I finished reading Defending Jacob, a book by William Landay, a couple of weeks ago.  It has probably been at least eight months since I read something I wanted to tell the world about.  It’s not that I haven’t been reading good books.  I have.  But I haven’t read a book I could suggest to the friend that only reads one or two books a year.  My sister went to the beach with her family a few weeks ago and asked me for a good read.  She’s so busy with work and children that I sweated bullets the whole week she was at Hilton Head worrying that she would hate the story I picked out for her.  I hadn’t read Defending Jacob yet so I gave her The Paris Wife by Paula McLain instead.  It was probably my favorite 2011 read aside from The Hunger Games Trilogy which pulled me down a rabbit hole I had no desire to leave until the last page of the last book.  Thankfully, she loved the book.  She’s a smart woman though.  She’s known me her entire life and still doesn’t trust me completely so she took along a Dorothea Benton Frank book as back up.

Defending Jacob is the book that Jodi Picoult and John Grisham might produce if they ever collaborated.  The story takes place in a suburb outside Boston, probably not so dissimilar from the one I live in outside Atlanta.  A successful district attorney finds out his 14 year old son is accused of murder.  There are moments of terrifying clarity for the reader that no matter  how much we hover, get to know the friends, insist on taking them to church, we can never truly understand the world our children live in and their place in it.  Our parents didn’t know enough about our teen world either, did they?

And like a good country road, this book has twists and turns you don’t expect.

So Is It A Good Story?  Yes.  You don’t even need to wait for it to come out in paperback.  It’s that good.