Jodi Picoult - House Rules. A review and disagreement.

When I saw it at Costco last week, I bought it. In hardcover. I wouldn't normally do that, but the jacket said the main character was an Aspie teen. How could I not??? I'd only read one other of her books, My Sister's Keeper, and enjoyed it, so I started right in.

Oh, Jodi, jumping on the autism/Asperger's bandwagon with not enough research. Or at least not enough in the real world.

Just a couple of pages into the book, it was obvious to me that Jodi had little actual experience with children in the spectrum, and what constitutes Asperger's. Her protagonist had withdrawn and gone non-verbal around age two, and it took many specialists working with him, a drastic change in diet, more supplements than even my ex takes (and that's a LOT), and constant monitoring by his mom to get him functional. His is mainstreamed, but has a sensory break room at the school with weighted blankets, special lamps, oh, you name it. His routines are too many to enumerate, and a break with one gets him stimming and panicking until a full fledged tantrum, complete with head-banging, ensues. His mother calls him high-functioning; I suppose he is, but this is a person who will never be able to live on his own. He will need someone to stand between him and the world for the rest of his life, which his younger brother talks about in one chapter.

Jacob is full-blown autistic. If any of you have read the books of Temple Grandin (or seen the movie), he is further along the spectrum, and less able to handle himself than she. A parent who has just received a diagnosis of Asperger's for their child who reads this will fall into despair at what lies ahead--with no good reason. I know quite a number of Aspies, some of them in my own family, who do not have behaviors that anywhere approach Jacob's.

Oh, and she talks about vaccines causing it. That article has been debunked. And while there may still be some debate on the massing of vaccines for an infant, it is not the definitive cause.

The plot itself was rather thin, which added to my un-enjoyment of the book, but I had to keep reading, hoping she was going to pull it all together in a satisfying manner. Nope. She tried to tie in Jacob's biggest obsession with the overall happening of the book, but it felt contrived, and left me confused as to why it happened at all.

I don't think I'll be reading anything else by Jodi Picoult. If all her other books are as heavy-handed, preachy, and poorly researched, they wouldn't be worth it.

Absolutely Alice.

My book group read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in honor of the new Tim Burton movie that has just come out. Incredibly (to me), several of our members had never read them. Seriously, how could anyone make it through childhood without reading them? Personally, they were amongst my favorite books in my younger years (the rest are for another post).

I had a boxed set of 33 1/3 rpm records of the great Cyril Ritchard reading AAiW, which had a hardcover copy of the book with Sir John Tenniel's illustrations. I knew that I listened to it a lot as a kid; but I had no idea how much, really, until I pulled them out about ten years ago to transfer them to CD, only to discover that I had literally worn them out with listening. I recently bought the mp3 from iTunes, and decided that it was time to introduce Rainer to Alice. So one day recently, while we were painting Lord of the Rings minis, we listened. I was thrilled when Rainer started chuckling, then cackling. We listened to the whole thing in one sitting. And I discovered that I remembered every musical cue, every rise and fall of his voice, every change in timbre. I loved it all over again. (I am determined to find his recording of Through the Looking Glass on mp3, too....)

Anyway. I was truly surprised when several of the folks in our group said that they disliked the book. I suppose I shouldn't have been, since everyone's taste is different; but since it was such a large part of my childhood, and so universal, it truly took me aback to hear their criticisms.

The most universal one was that they couldn't connect to Alice as a character; that they didn't care about her, she didn't develop. My answer to that was that the books were written as stories told to a small child as we would tell bedtime stories: what happens *to* them, not about them. That didn't cut it. The other complaint, which I answered with the same argument, was that there was no discernible plot. Heck, that just never bothered me. :)

I hear some not-so-good things about the new movie. I will go anyway, though, partially to vet it for Rainer who is concerned that it might be too intense for him, and partially for me, simply because it's Alice.