I read two Jodi Picoult books

here are my thoughts

The last two weeks have been rough (politically, spiritually, etc.) so forgive me — I needed to read something digestible, and Jodi Picoult delivered… kind of. Expanded thoughts below.

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Before this month, the only Jodi Picoult book I had read was My Sister’s Keeper, probably 15 years ago. At my (hippie, Montessori-like) middle school, the 7th and 8th grade English teacher had a library in her classroom that was off-limits to 5th and 6th graders, due to the books containing subject matter that was deemed inappropriate for the 10- to 12-year-old crowd. If I recall correctly, My Sister’s Keeper stood on that forbidden bookshelf, which made it enticing. After securing my own copy, I devoured it, wide-eyed the whole time. The drama! The stakes! The plot twist!

I probably didn’t pick up another Jodi Picoult book again because her books fall squarely in the category of pop literature—the type of books you see at airports, the book equivalent of a guilty pleasure TV show, the kind of author where you have to double-check they don’t have a ghostwriter. (Sorry!) Plus, she has a reputation for writing about traumatic topics in a way that is too entertaining and perhaps exploitative? But my boyfriend gave me Small Great Things for Christmas (in a thoughtfully curated book package that consisted of Ask Again, Yes, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, Yin Yoga: Stretch the Mindful Way, and Cool Yoga Tricks — he knows my interests), so I gave it a try.

Guys, I was reading this book while standing on the subway platform (a time when I usually dissociate and/or play the NYT Spelling Bee). I was late to a dinner reservation because I was reading this book. I’m never late!

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; after all, Picoult is popular for this exact reason. Also, it strikes me that I’m probably Picoult’s exact target audience, which is to say privileged white woman. Lots of books are written for this audience, mind you. But wow.

The project that Picoult tackles in Small Great Things is *extremely* eyebrow-raising. I had to check when the book was published (2016) because I was thinking, there’s no way she’s gotten away with this. The book alternates perspectives between a Black nurse, a white supremacist, and a white lawyer. That’s a choice, I thought, in reference to her narrating from the Black female perspective. Oh, that’s another choice, I thought, when I started the white supremacist chapter and the n-word was immediately dropped.

The plot: Ruth Jefferson, a Black woman, is an experienced labor and delivery nurse. During one shift, she is assigned a couple who have just given birth to their first baby; they also happen to be white supremacists and request that she not touch their baby. Later, the baby dies — and Ruth was the only one in the room when he started showing symptoms that were cause for alarm. Did she murder the baby, or was it a tragic accident?

The Author’s Note at the end of the book explains the extensive research (on racism, the law, the history of the white supremacy movement, and other topics the book explores) that Picoult engaged with in order to write the story. Picoult explains that she spent time listening to Black women and former skinheads. She admits that she was nervous about the reception of the book, but that the feedback has been positive. I had suspicions about this, so I Googled it. A NYT article by Roxane Gay came up.

Gay is remarkably generous in her review, and gives Picoult credit for trying. Of course, though, I think Gay nailed what felt wrong about the book to me — specifically the sections written from Ruth, the Black nurse’s, perspective. “Her blackness is clinical, overarticulated,” Gay writes. “…The more we see of Ruth and her family, the more their characterization feels like black-people bingo — as if Picoult is working through a checklist of issues in attempt to say everything about race in one book.” Yep, this seems about right.

The white womanhood and fragility demonstrated by the lawyer, Kennedy, also seemed to be of a cliche, checklist-y nature. She tells Ruth, “I don’t see color,” in their first meeting — the classic “yikes” line, though perhaps in 2016 it was less well-known to white people that this is a harmful line of thinking. Kennedy’s path to understanding the Black experience is, of course, illuminated by Ruth, who takes the her into a TJ Maxx and watches her witness the sharp contrast in the way the store employees treat each of them. And, surprise! The white woman’s epiphany about race comes at the cost of a Black woman’s suffering.

(For a truly chilling and accurate portrayal of the “well-meaning white woman,” that will make my fellow white women burn with shameful recognition, please read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid.)

The white supremacist sections were hard to read, but they were probably the most compelling. I did recoil every time I read the n-word, knowing that a white woman wrote it. But it’s clear that Picoult’s research on the psychology of skinheads was thorough. Disclaimer that I don’t know any white supremacists personally (at least not that I know of — according to the book, they hide in plain sight), but Picoult’s project in this arena felt the most authentic.

Just like My Sister’s Keeper, Small Great Things feeds you a plot twist at the end like a piece of candy. I felt guilty for relishing it, but I had to admit that it was clever, and that it underscored many of the main themes of the book (hypocrisy; the uselessness of hate; self-delusion; etc.).

Anyway, I finished Small Great Things and immediately started House Rules, which my roommate had a copy of.

House Rules is about Jacob, who has Asperger’s, nowadays classified as “high-functioning” autism. I don’t know Picoult’s personal experience with autism, but I had many of the same criticisms about this portrayal as I did about the way she describes race — like there was, in Gay’s words, a “checklist of issues” associated with autism crammed into one book. Jacob can’t make eye contact, has special interests, gets violent when his routine is disrupted, needs a weighted blanket to calm down, and has aversions to certain colors or numbers. These are obviously very common symptoms of autism (though it’s probably unlikely that a real person would exhibit each and every one of them, as Jacob does…). But when so many of the above are mentioned repeatedly, you start to feel like Picoult is saying, “Look! I did so much research on autism!” just like in Small Great Things, where it’s like, “Look! I did so much research on racism!”

Like Small Great Things, House Rules is a legal thriller. What appears to be a ruthless murder of a young, intelligent woman rocks a Vermont town. The woman who died happened to be Jacob’s social skills tutor, and he happened to have an appointment with her the very day she went missing. Was Jacob responsible? Is he a kid who can’t make eye contact/show empathy/think metaphorically, or is he a killer?

The ending of House Rules was not surprising — I saw the twist coming from a mile away, which cannot be said for Small Great Things. Perhaps, since House Rules was written six years before Small Great Things, Picoult has sharpened her skills in this arena.

House Rules also contains what I now recognize as a classic Picoult relational dynamic: one person has an “obvious” disability / illness / unfortunate situation, but the people who really suffer are those who are in charge of supporting this person (family members, friends, etc.). Jacob is a teen with autism on trial for murder, but Picoult manages to make the reader feel even more empathetic towards his mother — who has given up career prospects, friendships, and a marriage to adhere to Jacob’s strict routines — and his younger brother, Theo, who is too often forced to play the role of older brother and too often overlooked by his mother because his brother’s needs are more urgent.

It’s clear that perceptions of neurodiversity have evolved significantly since this book came out, and thank god for that. Jacob’s mother blames vaccines (!) for Jacob’s autism in her narration, and puts him on diets, supplements, and ABA therapy — not for his greater wellbeing, it seems, but to make the autism go away. Picoult seems aligned with these decisions, and doesn’t challenge them at all.

These books are page turners. They go down like butter, which, given the subject matter, seems problematic. However, it’s possible that because of this same quality, they reach an audience that previously wouldn’t be fucked to think about these issues a day in their lives.

I think it’s really hard (impossible?) to do what Picoult is trying to do, and really, truly get it right. I don’t know if I can say that her books do harm, but I can say that my main criticism of them is that they perpetuate schools of thought that feel stale and hackneyed these days. (But maybe didn’t in 2010 and 2016, when the books were written? Is my critical gaze too 2025?)

A final note and a question for the group. I have 0 guilt about consuming “trashy” TV. In fact, most TV I consume is trashy (read: reality dating shows). But I found myself feeling a little more insecure about reading books that could fall under this category. Maybe I pride myself on having elevated literary taste. For example, I will never pick up a Colleen Hoover book; you couldn’t catch me dead. (I did, however, watch the Blake Lively movie — too awful for words…)

So I’m curious: does anyone else feel this way about the quality of the content they consume, specifically when it comes to TV vs. books? What about music? Do you read or watch or listen to whatever you want sans guilt, or is there a little part of you who judges yourself about the content you consume? This topic could be a whole blog post in itself, and maybe it will be once I organize my thoughts a little more. For now, though, drop your opinions in the comments (thank you to Emma for being my one and only commenter so far ;) And of course, let me know your Jodi thoughts!