Book Review: PLAIN TRUTH

Title: Plain Truth
Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Pages: 451
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

Eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher’s life is bound by the beliefs that govern the Amish community’s way of life. So when she gives birth to a baby in the middle of the night, she wishes it might just go away. When it disappears, she thinks it’s a miracle. Her parents, Aaron and Sarah Fisher, need never know. But then the baby shows up dead.

 

Katie denies that the baby is hers, denies having been pregnant at all. DS Lizzie Munro and public prosecutor George Callahan build a case of neonaticide against her. It is a charge that may see her put away for years. Until lawyer Eleanor ‘Ellie’ Hathaway, niece of Sarah’s sister Leda, offers to represent her in court.

 

Ellie, fresh from having won a case on behalf of her client, an elementary school principal acquitted of the sexual molestation of six schoolgirls, is unhappy with herself. Seeking a break from her partner of eight years, she visits her aunt Leda for a much-needed break. Ellie wants to prove Katie’s innocence but it won’t be easy. For Ellie, struggling with a ticking biological clock and just out of a relationship with a man who didn’t want children, neonaticide is an unforgivable crime.

 

The book is written in the third person omniscient PoV in the past tense as well as in the first person past tense PoV of Ellie. The story picks up from page one, without wasting time in back story.

The pace of the narrative is slow and laidback, in keeping with life in an Amish community. As readers, we don’t feel impatience.

 

While I liked the investigation around the case, the relationship between Coop and Ellie bored me. Ellie’s concerns regarding the relationship, stemming from her relationship with Stephen, should have been left out of this book.

 

The only other book I’ve read by this author was Small Great Things, which I had appreciated a lot. This one paled in comparison. As courtroom dramas go, it wasn’t all that impressive.

 

I didn’t care for any of the characters either. Ellie took the moral high ground, considering neonaticide unforgivable. But she herself admitted that she had defended all kinds of criminals and helped them get acquitted. In fact, when we first meet her, she has just succeeded in getting a paedophile, a middle school principal, no less, acquitted.

 

The book ended on a bittersweet note that was more satisfying than a declaration of innocence might have been.