"Then again, he also made himself look like a ruthless murderer."

I was so caught off guard by the ending of House Rules that I literally passed out, hit my head on a coffee table, and woke up to my roommate dragging me out to the woods trying to set up a crime scene with what he supposed was my lifeless body. Just kidding, I figured out what happened like halfway through the book and trudged along until the end.

To be fair, though, I couldn't quite predict how the truth would come out, since apparently Emma and Oliver were dead set on never letting Jacob explain himself. I assumed they would go to court once the jury had decided on a verdict and Theo would confess to everything right before they announced it. What I didn't realize until the end, though, was that Theo still kind of assumed Jacob killed her despite the fact that he saw her fall and knew she didn't keep running after him. That seems silly and implausible to me, but so does the fact that Oliver and Emma live happily ever after despite the fact that they've only known each other for a month and only in a really, really weird context. But I digress.

I agree with what a few people said in class—that it was an interesting perspective on Asperger’s, but the rants on how the syndrome is entirely caused by vaccines just threw any credibility it had out the door for me. There is little to no scientific evidence that vaccines have any effect on autism in children. That was a rumor that actually started, I think, in England and spread like wildfire thanks to the internet. I just think it was quite silly of her to bring it up and turn what could have been a convincing narrative from the point of view of someone with Asperger’s into something that seemed like a weak lobbying attempt.

Anyway, I really wish that with this, my final entry on the book, I could write something deep and expository, something other than a reaction. But honestly I can’t find much to say other than it was fairly entertaining up until the last 150 pages or so.