"House Rules" by Jodi Piccoult

   

"House Rules" by Jodi Piccoult.  Listening to this audio book, I enjoyed hearing the calm soothing voice of the reader who read for the voice of Jacob (one of the main characters). Jacob has asperger's syndrome, and along with it many obsession compulsive things that he does in his routine schedule. When Jacob is thrown between a quarrel between his tutor and their boyfriend, he find that he can use this situation to his advantage.  

You see, one aspect of Jacob's obsessions is that he loves crimes shows, criminology, the study of crimes, and when Jacob's tutor turns up missing he decides to recreate the crime scene, unfortunately this turns Jacob into a likely suspect.

I enjoyed the description of Jacob's OCD' s.  Jacob has to eat food according to the color, easily enough, but when you compound this with eating one specific color, to eating it on a specific day, it can be more challenging.

  For instance on" all-white-food-Friday" :he'll eat a meal of mashed potatoes, rice, and Bread.  This created a challenge for his Mother who cooks his meals, not to mention that minimizing the amount of gluten intake can be helpful for people with Asperger's: this means his mother will also have  to find gluten-free food options for the meal preparations as well.

More on Jacobs obsessive compulsions, when he goes to the grocery stores, he expects to see the "sample lady" serve her routine samples on a specific day, if he doesn't he may have an episode of thrashing about until he needs to be put in a hold by his mother.  Jacob also avoids the color yellow, all of his clothes need to be organized according to color, and he must have his money his wallet organized according to the dollar amount, facing the upright position.  

Reading about Jacob's asberger's helped me understand when at the world of asberger's looks like, and to see how the writer depicts the way his mother copes with her son's disability is amazing.  I enjoyed the character of Jacob describing his own symptoms of what its like to have asberger's and how he explains how many of his actions are just plain unavoidable.