Tuesday 2 August 2011 | By: Nicole @ Nicole About TOwn

Review: The Pact

Title: The Pact
Author: Jodi Picoult
Genre: Fiction & Literature, Social Issues
Rating: PG
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: September 1st 2006 (first published May 6th 1998)
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 496 pages
Source: Purchased Finished Copy
My Rating: 3*

[Goodreads | Amazon]

For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duty-- they've grown so close it seems they have always been a part of each other's lives. Parents and children alike have been best friends, so it's no surprise that in high school Chris and Emily's friendship blossoms into something more. They've been soul mates since they were born.


So when midnight calls from the hospital come in, no one is ready for the appalling truth: Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head. There's a single unspent bullet in the gun that Chris took from his father's cabinet-- a bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself. But a local detective has doubts about the suicide pact that Chris has described.

Quotes

"I love you," he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."
"Do you know what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home? What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person. I was lucky enough to have her all along."
"He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B."
"Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time."
"The mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting"

 My Thoughts

While I did like this book, it was not one of my favourite Jodi Picoult books.

There was just something about this book, and I still can't figure out what it is exactly, that I wasn't able to connect with.  The names drove me crazy.  I wasn't able to keep track of who was who and I had to keep going back to the beginning to remind myself who was who.  It also didn't help that there were these flashbacks that didn't really add to the story, in my opinion.

What I did love is that once again Jodi made me believe in a situation that was so far-fetched.  Do I think that a suicide pact is far-fetched?  No, I don't.  But the way that the one in this book plays out is.  Even after having read the book twice, I still don't know the reason it happened in the first place.  Not to mention, that Emily, who comes up with the idea never gives a reason for her wanting to commit suicide, not even to Chris who ends up being the surviving member of the pact.  Even though he is never given a reason a reason, Chris decides to end his life simply because he can't see his life being worth living without her in it.  To me, that isn't realistic at all and that is where Jodi Picoult's talent really comes in.  While I may not have believed in the circumstances, she did have me believing in the characters.


0 comments:

Post a Comment