House rules

I could not put this book down and shorted myself a few hours of sleep as a result. I don't honestly know why. Perhaps I just wanted to know how they were going to get themselves out of the predicament.

The next morning, though, some inconsistencies about the plot woke me up by staring me in the face and muttering at me.

- Why does the father suddenly show up? He's drawn as a character with slight Asperger's himself, which should preclude him from feeling particularly responsible for being there - at least in Picoult's book. (I'll make a note here to mention that I am not up on current knowledge of AS disorders and cannot verify most of the symptoms that Picoult has written about. However, she has written a father who might or might not have Aspergers Syndrome, but failed to choose one way or another.) It seems to me that his entire purpose in arriving for the trial is to conveniently make the mother feel guilty for sleeping with her son's lawyer.

- That said - what kind of worried and stressed parent hops into bed with the lawyer representing her ASD child in court for murder? During the case? Did someone think that women wouldn't read this book if there wasn't a romance of some sort in it?

- How come no-one bothered listening to the younger kid? Again, he tried to say something several times, but got overlooked or ignored, and again, like the above two points, it feels more like something that the author needed in order to drive the plot, not something that the characters needed.

- And finally, when a 15 year old runs away from home, why does he run to the father he's seen only a couple of times in his life? Would he even have recognized his father in the airport if his mother hadn't arrived on an earlier flight? And hey, for someone so tense about money, why didn't she just call California and ask her ex to put the boy on the next flight home instead of flying out there herself?