Even though it’s broad daylight; even though there are cars going up and down the street, I walk behind the house and sit down on the swingset. The majority of these rules come naturally to me – well, except for brushing my teeth, which I hate doing; and taking care of Theo. But then Jacob showed up in the caf one day because he’d finished his math packet in some freakishly short amount of time and his teacher had dismissed him, and of course he made a beeline for me.

When he could not seem to connect with any children at his preschool, I organized a no-holds-barred birthday party for him, complete with water balloons and pin the tail on the donkey. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, first defined what is now known as Asperger’s Syndrome in a landmark paper in 1944, after he identified consistent symptoms including ‘a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements’ in a study of boys with what he termed ‘autistic psychopathy’. So when this was chosen for my bookclub, I wasn't exactly looking forward to it, and prepared myself to be reticent at the next meeting. I had raved about it to two friends that have a 17 year old son with Asperger's and the many similarities and explanations regarding what it is like to have Asperger's. It’s both a tender look at the depths of a mother’s love and a searing examination of how we treat those who are different, and whether we expect them to play by the same rules.House Rules by Jodi Picoult is the story of Jacob Hunt, an 18-year-old autistic man from Townsend, VT accused of murder. The one feeling I do have on turning the last page of Jodi's books is sorry that I have finished it. I could talk forever about friction ridge detail in fingerprint analysis and whether it is an art or a science (for example, DNA of identical twins is identical; we know that based on scientific analysis. The fact that we emerged from the same gene pool is mind-boggling to me, because we could not be more different from each other if we actively attempted it.

p. 20) Jacob says, “Why would I want to be friends with kids who are nasty to people like me anyway? The teacher made a popular boy wear fake glasses so I’d have someone to connect with, but as it turned out, he didn’t really want to talk about whether archaeopteryx should be categorized as a prehistoric bird or a dinosaur. Or even worse, imagine being the person talking, and not getting the hint when the victim of your conversation is desperately trying to escape.It wasn’t until the early 1990s that his findings began to gain wider notice and Asperger’s Syndrome became a standardised diagnosis for high-functioning autism across the globe.

As with many of Jodi Picoult’s previous novels House Rules is written from the perspective of several different characters, each taking turns to narrate a chapter. I can only hope that HOUSE RULES allows people a glimpse into the world of both a child with Asperger’s as well as the effect it has on a family.Then I sit down at my desk and carefully cut the page out of the old, used noteBook so that I don’t have to hear the sound of paper being crumpled or torn. House Rules", much like Picoult's other books, is about one family's struggles with something so cataclysmic that readers feel instantly sympathetic. Five voices tell the tale: Jacob’s own; his brother, Theo’s; his mother, Emma’s; his lawyer, Oliver’s; and the investigating police officer, Rich’s. Could this little boy tell you about the Therizinosaurid found in Utah, with fifteen-inch claws that look like something out of a teen slasher flick? I get upset if plans don’t work out or if something in my schedule changes, and sometimes I just can’t control what happens.

It was sometime around two years old when he began to drop words, to stop making eye contact, to avoid connections with people. To go into any more detail would give away the plot, all I can say is that the writing is engaging and totally believable. One could read it positively as showing the struggle faced by an autistic youth, who, even as an adult, is treated as a child; and everyone talks over him, distrusts him, and fails to recognize his autonomy. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Involves a dead body and a whole raft of emotional family issues, with an interesting twist at the end.

Jacob’s number one special interst is forensics, and he has a habit of getting involved in local crime scenes and offering unsolicited advice to the police. I wonder where he’s been, and if Mom knows, and then the thought is gone, replaced by the vision of the dead man’s bare skin, blue underneath the floodlights, and the pink, stained snow all around him. If you met him now, the first thing you’d notice is that he might have forgotten to change his shirt from yesterday, or to brush his hair.