"Plain Truth"

Last night I couldn't fall asleep for anything, so I decided to finish reading the book Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. This is the first book by this top-selling author that I've read. It was an interesting, well-written book; but it's not going on my list of favorites.

An Amish girl is on trial for killing her newborn baby. Her distant cousin (who is not Amish) is a defense attorney and decides to take the case, even though it means moving in with her Amish relatives for several months. Finally by the end of the book, the accused girl remembers as much as she can about what happened. She had been sneaking away to visit her brother who had left the Amish community. While he was in classes, she had developed a relationship with his roommate and ended up pregnant. She didn't know what to do, so she didn't do anything except hope that the whole situation would just go away. In the middle of the night several weeks premature, the baby was born. She gave birth in the barn, cut the cord with baling wire scissors, fell asleep holding the baby and praying that God would take care of everything. When she woke up, the baby was gone. She tried to cover up the fact that she'd been there and then went on with her life. During the trial, two witnesses testified that medical evidence proved that there were at least two explanations of how the baby could have died: he had an infection caused by unpasteurized milk (the girl lived on a dairy farm) and this infection would have killed him within the first week of his life; or he could have been smothered. In the very last chapter, the girl's mother admits to the attorney cousin that she was the one who had killed the baby in order to save her daughter from any repercussions of having a baby outside of marriage.

The storyline kept me interested all the way through the book, but I definitely didn't like the ending. She spent the entire book proving that the Amish aren't capable of violence because of their intense commitment to their religious beliefs, but then we find out that the mother did commit murder. I guess it was a good twist after all the previous events in the story, but I didn't like it.

So this morning Luke picked out the next book for me to read, and I was able to start reading it while Seth was in speech therapy (he has started going in to his therapist on his own while I wait in the waiting room -- he's starting to get appropriately independent :-).