wicked little town

i'm sure everyone out there is dying to know what my life has been like since i moved to st. louis and became a grown-up, so...here's to all of you on the edge of your seats.

wait, before i talk about being a grown-up i guess i should say that i spent the last weekend being as juvenile as possible while attempting to entertain kyle j smith in this newly awesome city: going to the zoo, playing in the city museum, watching high school musical 3 (albeit making it a fantastic drinking game), instituting daily naps and daily ice cream...a very, very good weekend.

grown-up activities: waking up at 5 am (or pm, if for a night shift), hopping on the metro link and heading into work to heal broken children for 12 hours at a time. getting slightly lost in more than slightly sketchy neighborhoods (hopefully no more since kyle graciously lent me his GPS) buying my own groceries, attempting to learn how to cook, trying to get my money's worth of UMSL's rec facilities, and finding things to do/places to see on my days off. after what should be sufficient recovery from my first 2 night shifts, i'm off till saturday. 4 shifts till i make my first trip home to KC.

i'm loving my job. the learning curve is a little steep but i have a fantastic preceptor and the experience i'm getting is incredible, a million billion times more than i could ever learn in kirksville. i am so excited to graduate and become a pediatric staff nurse...it's wonderful experiencing what this job will really be like for me and finding out how sure i am about my future. my future is kids, absolutely.

to the publisher's whore.

she used to be my favorite author. i actually sent this in the snail mail the other day...kind of just to prove to someone that i would actually do it, but it went nevertheless.

Dear Jodi Picoult,

I’ve been a huge fan of yours since, like everyone else, reading My Sister’s Keeper. After that book I devoured everything else you had written previously and I was hooked. The plots always make for fascinating page-turners, the characters are real, and I bitterly loved the real-life problems they got themselves into, because you have an amazing gift for writing what is on every woman’s heart. We have all been there with your characters, if not in their extreme situations but always in their gut-wrenching decisions and passionate ties to each other. I hadn’t been keeping up with you for a while so when I saw Handle With Care on a shelf recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see you had written another book so soon.

However, I was un-pleasantly surprised with the book itself. I found the motivations of the characters false. I found it very hard to believe Charlotte would really destroy her best friend and their relationship in one fell, greedy, swoop. The illicit kiss between Piper and Sean was awkward, baseless, and served no purpose except making me nervous for the last few chapters. And the ending plainly sucked. You violated an unspoken rule: when a beloved character dies, his or her death has to mean something. Unless the point of the story is that nothing means anything, and that’s never the point of your stories. Willow’s death rendered the entire book meaningless and I felt robbed of the time I spent reading. It seemed like a cheap, cop-out way to end the story without really ending it at all.

In the past I have always enjoyed your impossible ethical clusterfucks and your ability to play devil’s advocate, getting the readers completely turned upside down from what they thought they believed. But a wrongful birth suit? This time you failed to sell me on both sides of the issue. I am a nursing student and medical malpractice is something I understand, but what I can’t buy into is the idea of a doctor failing to do her job because she allowed someone to live. It’s completely backwards. And I hated that the plaintiffs in the suit didn’t even embrace what they were fighting for. I love your courtroom dramas but what makes them so exciting is the raw passion behind each side of the case. This time the lawsuit, which was supposedly the driving force in the story, fell flat. You only weakly defended the school of thought that handicapped people have the same rights to life as others but personally, I hope and pray that when it comes down to it, most people believe that. Otherwise, we’re really no better than Nazis.

The superhuman rate at which you produce novels makes me wonder who you are writing for anymore. I’ve loved all of your books but I have noticed an evolution over time, a shift from the simple problems between people (e.g., Harvesting the Heart) to these layer cakes of hot-button issues and pop culture. Stylistically, you have created a niche that sells but I think you are dangerously close to becoming your own cliché. You’re overusing the devices that once made your writing unique, such as explaining the protagonists’ conflict through the metaphoric lens of their vocation or passion. I used to love that. This time, with Charlotte’s recipes, it felt forced. Most of this book felt forced, really. Like you were imprisoned by Annie Wilkes and you had to type the manuscript on a broken typewriter with only nine fingers so that she would give you your Novril. Or maybe just imprisoned by your publisher.

Sincerely,

Jamie Menown