15 August 2013

Author Spotlight Thursday: Jodi Picoult (Special Review)

Hello Bookies! Guess what today is? It's Thursday which means it is time for another Author Spotlight Thursday! I hope everyone is enjoying this new feature on the blog because I've been enjoying it a lot. Well are you ready to find out who I've featured? 


Jodi Picoult! 
That's right! If you don't know who Jodi Picoult is and you haven't read any of her books then what are you doing with your life!? Get on it! I recently read one of her novels House Rules so I thought that I would share that review with you as apart of Jodi's spotlight. I hope you all enjoy it! 


House Rules by Jodi Picoult
Synopsis: When your son can't look you in the eye...does that mean he's guilty?
Jacob Hunt is a teen with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, though he is brilliant in many ways. But he has a special focus on one subject - forensic analysis. A police scanner in his room clues him in to crime scenes, and he's always showing up and telling the cops what to do. And he's usually right.
But when Jacob's small hometown is rocked by a terrible murder, law enforcement comes to him. Jacob's behaviors are hallmark Asperger's, but they look a lot like guilt to the local police. Suddenly the Hunt family, who only want to fit in, are directly in the spotlight. For Jacob's mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication why nothing is normal because of Jacob.
And over this small family, the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder?


My Review:
I bought House Rules by Jodi Picoult from the Used Book Superstore and this is my honest review. 

I've only read one other book by Jodi Picoult so you can imagine my excitement to finally be picking up another one of her novels. This one even happened to be on a topic that I have recently been interested in which is an disability called Autism. In the novel we meet Jacob who has Asperger's Syndrome, which is another form of Autism. Although Jacob's case isn't as severe as many others his disability affects him quite a bit. A symptom of someone with Aspergers is having an obsession with something for long periods of time. Jacob's obsession at this time was Forensic Science which gets him into something that he was definitely not expecting. 

I really liked Jacob's character, the other books I've read with main characters or side characters who had a disability were often hard to understand which made the book in a way hard to enjoy but with this novel, Picoult gave us many chances to enter Jacob's head and see what he was thinking. The chapters that we were in Jacob's head were most often my favorite because they gave us what we needed to understand Jacob and what was really going on through his head. 

Some books don't do very well with switching to a different POV but Picoult did a fantastic job keeping everything in order and not throwing too much in one chapter that way we were able to keep up with the story. So when we first met Detective Matson in his own chapter I was thinking that maybe he would possibly be a love interest but I'm sort of glad that he wasn't because it would have made things pretty difficult. But then Oliver whom is Jacob's lawyer came into the picture and he seemed so innocent and stuff that I just couldn't help but fall for him! 

I really like that Picoult has enough talent to make court interesting. Obviously there are so many court cases going on today and most of them are so boring but she makes them extremely interesting, you don't have to like be extremely intelligent to know what going on in the court scenes which I give her credit for because I imagine it's hard to write a scene that most people completely understand. 

I enjoyed mostly everything about the book the characters they were all extremely interesting and completely there own person. The plot I absolutely loved, I loved following the characters trying to figure out who did what and what would happen and things like that but the only thing I didn't like was the ending. After everything all the details of the characters of the crime scene everything that happens in court and we don't get to find out what happens?! That really really irked me. I was considering giving it a 3 stars instead of 4 but I really did like everything else in the book except the very end. So in the end the book does get a 4 out of 5 stars.



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