About a Book

You have to hand it to Jodi Picoult in House Rules : she writes enough mystery around her characters to leave readers scratching their heads, wondering if they ought to sympathize with and stay with the characters through the entire book, or jump ship early because it seems so obvious where the book is headed. In House Rules, Jacob is an 18-year old with Asperger syndrome, raised by and living with his single mother Emma, carrying on a typical love/hate relationship with his 15-year old brother Theo. Obsession with the TV show CrimeBusters and crime scenes gets him into trouble when his social skills tutor and crush Jess ends up dead, and he steps in to lay out her corpse perfectly for the police to discover. Arrested for Jess’s murder, Jacob struggles to explain his involvement in Jess’s death to his family, the police, and the courts. A great deal of the novel is spent on Jacob’s thoughts, then showing him fail to clearly verbalize those thoughts during his court case.

Donna Tartt ’s 2014 bestselling behemoth (771 pages) The Goldfinch tracks the maturation of its main character Theo from age 13, when he’s visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother. During their visit, a terrorist bomb detonates, killing her, and setting the path for the next dozen or so years of his life and the book. At the museum, post-bomb, Theo encounters an older gentleman named “Welty” who dies in the attack, but first gives Theo a ring to return to his business partner “Hobie.” Theo also believes the man tells him to take a painting titled The Goldfinch , a 1654 work by Carel Fabritius, which he does. The painting acts as a last physical tether between Theo and his mom, which helps explain his dedication to it. During the sprawling narrative that ensues, Theo, now a partial orphan because his father is a deadbeat, moves in with his school friend Andy Barbour. He befriends Hobie, and lives out a new reality without his mom that might just be okay, unt