House rules

I'd read My Sister's Keeper ages ago and enjoyed it well enough, so I thought I'd give Jodi Picoult another go...she has to have racked up this many bestsellers for a reason, right? But holy smokes did I hate this! So much! It feels like she took some of the key plot elements of My Sister's Keeper (same-gender siblings, one of whom has a condition that requires an extraordinary amount of parental attention, a big court case), and mashed them up with a pamphlet from Autism Speaks (an organization widely rejected among actually autistic people). The book is, at its heart, a family drama. Emma Hunt is the over-extended single mother of two teenage boys: Jacob, who has what used to be referred to as Asperger's Syndrome but is now considered low-support-needs autism, and Theo, his neurotypical younger brother. Their father, Henry, left the family before Theo's first birthday, remaining in his sons' lives only through child support checks and twice-yearly phone calls, leaving Emma without a support system and Theo without much in the way of active parental supervision as his resentment towards his brother's near-monopoly on their mother's attention curdles into some breaking-and-entering into empty homes. Jacob's special interest is forensic crime scene analysis, which he is so deeply obsessed with that he reads industry journals and uses a police scanner to arrive at crime scenes and provide suggestions to the cops. And then, one fateful day, shortly after Jacob and his social skills tutor, Jess, have an argument in public, Theo breaks into the home she is house-sitting and surprises her as she's exiting the shower. Next thing you know, Jess is found dead and Jacob winds up arrested for her murder. Emma is terrified that the things she knows from long experience are manifestations of Jacob's neurodivergence (a flat affect, an inability to correctly read social situations, a powerful reluctance to make eye contact) will be read instead as markers of his guilt, so she hires a very green young attorney to represent her son in his trial. I will try to start with something kind here. As seems to be typical, Picoult uses a rotating-narrator structure (Emma, Jacob, Theo, the lawyer, and the detective), which gives the reader a nicely-rounded set of perspectives through which to experience the story. It also helps keep the pace moving briskly. That's about all the good stuff. I had SO many issues with the plot and characterizations in this book. First of all, as someone who not only came from a family with split-up parents but also did practice some family law, there is no family court judge I can imagine who would have just let Henry completely depart his children's lives (even despite moving to the other side of the country for work). Even if Jacob could not deal with plane travel, at the very least he would have been required to have custodial time with Theo during school breaks and summers! But of course, this would mean that the scenario Picoult wanted to present of the tension between the brothers would be less compelling, so can't do that! And then there are the characters, especially Emma. On the one hand, her devotion to Jacob is written movingly, and Picoult skillfully portrays both the fierceness of the love behind that devotion with an acknowledgement of the sacrifices that it has required of her and her guilt about the the toll it's had on her relationship with her other child. On the other, she's depicted as leaning towards the “vaccines cause autism” idea that has been thoroughly debunked without any textual pushback. Her devotion to a gluten and casein-free diet and a variety of supplements for Jacob is more sympathetic, despite a lack of scientific support, as the decisions of an overwhelmed mother who desperately wants to help her child, but giving tacit support to the vaccine theory of autism is just gross! Also, we are clearly meant to understand and sympathize with the fact that she does not tell her ex-husband that Jacob has been arrested for murder until circumstances literally force her to do so! WHAT?! If a man had been portrayed as hiding a child's arrest and pending trial for killing someone from that child's mother, he would be understood as a monster! Because that is a horrible thing to hide from a child's parent! And just the cherry on the awful sundae is the third-act decision to have Emma literally run across town in the wee hours of the morning, with zero prompting, to set up a romantic subplot with Jacob's lawyer that has nothing to do with anything! We haven't even gotten into the ways I found her handling of autism generally to have significant issues! First of all, she references once or twice autism as being something that needs a “cure”, and more widely insinuates that it's akin to a disease or personality disorder. This is, from what I understand, not a perspective shared by the majority of actual autistic people. Second, Jacob is as much a stereotype as a person...instead of displaying the characteristics of autism at various levels, the way an actual human being would, we are meant to understand that he displays basically all of them, to a significant degree, all of the time. Third, she repeatedly insists through characters that are meant to be professional experts that autistic people don't have empathy or theory of mind, which is just not true. And finally, despite repeatedly claiming that Jacob is almost pathologically honest, Picoult never has anyone directly ask Jacob exactly what happened on the afternoon Jess died. The most preposterous way she does this is through the lawyer, who says he cannot ask Jacob about it for fear of compromising his ethical duty to be honest with the court. But she doesn't have Jacob's defense rest on being not guilty. Instead, his plea is not guilty by reason of insanity. Which means that he has essentially admitted that Jacob committed the crime, but that his inability to perceive right from wrong at the time of the offense precludes a finding that he is criminally responsible for his actions! So if Jacob had confessed to him that he was guilty, he would not have been precluded in presenting his defense! It makes no sense! I have more, but honestly it's not worth going into. It's just really bad.