House Rules: the powerful must-read story of a mother's unthinkable choice by the number one bestselling author of A Spark of Light

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Rich, the guy’s covered in blood from head to toe and he’s lying here in his tighty-whiteys. You think he got sexually assaulted and then committed hara-kiri?” The police chief snorts. “I know I don’t have the vast detective experience you do after fifteen years on the job in the metropolis of Townsend but –“ This little revelation in the closing chapters sure brought a little twist to the story line, but it sure made my insides twist, fold and wrapped when cold, blind following of rules collide with something as heartwarming as brotherhood. In the bedroom where I’m standing, there’s a whole wall of shelves filled with electronic games. Wii and Xbox, mostly, with a few Nintendo DS tossed in for good measure. We don’t have any gaming systems; we can’t afford them. The crap Jacob has to take at breakfast—a whole extra meal of pills and shots and supplements—costs a fortune, and I know that my mother stays up nights sometimes doing freelance editing jobs just so that she can pay Jess, Jacob’s social skills tutor. If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that their saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.

How do you feel about Jacob’s initial decision to cover up Jess’s death and falsely implicate Mark Maguire? Do you think he was fully aware of the consequences of his actions from the beginning? If not, is there a point in the novel where he begins to realize the enormity of what he’s done?

What others are saying about House Rules

Jacob Hunt – The eldest son of Emma, and Theo's brother. He has Asperger's syndrome and because of the way Jacob behaves and interacts with others, he is deemed suspicious by the police, and subsequently accused of murdering Jess Ogilvy, his social skills tutor. When Jacob arrived at the home for his tutoring sessions, he staged a crime scene to make it appear as if Jess's boyfriend, Mark Maguire, had committed the murder, and then tried to make it appear as if it was a kidnapping. Eventually, Jacob is arrested for Jess's murder. During the trial, Jacob states that he staged the crime scene to take care of his brother, in accordance with a "house rule" set by Emma to take care of one another. Jacob asserts that if, by chance, the circumstances arose again, he would do it again for his brother. That’s what I do this afternoon, after my brother decides to cast me as the perp in his fake crime scene. I’ll be honest with you—it wasn’t the fact that he took my sneakers without asking or even that he stole hair out of my brush (which is, frankly, Silence of the Lambs creepy). It was that when I saw Jacob in the kitchen with his corn-syrup blood and his fake head injury and all the evidence pointing to me, for a half a second, I thought: I wish. Jacob sits up and sighs. The food dye and corn syrup mixture has matted his dark hair; his eyes are shining, even though they won’t meet mine. “Do you honestly believe I’d execute the same crime scene twice?” He unfolds a fist and for the first time I see a tuft of cornsilk hair. Jacob’s father is a towhead – or at least he was when he walked out on us fifteen years ago, leaving me with Jacob and Theo - his brand-new, blond baby brother. I start to follow him along a marked trail. “Who the hell goes jogging at night in the dead of winter?”

Did you ever suspect Jacob? Or Theo? When did you guess what had happened to Jess? Did you enjoy the story’s detective elements? I may be autistic, but I can’t tell you what day of the week your mother’s thirty-second birthday fell on. I can’t do logarithms in my head. I can’t look at a patch of sod and tell you there are six thousand, four hundred and forty-six individual blades of grass. On the other hand, I could tell you anything you ever wanted to know about lightning, polymerase chain reactions, famous movie quotes, and lower Cretaceous sauropods. I can memorize a TV Guide schedule without even trying; I taught myself how to read Middle Egyptian and I helped my calculus teacher fix his computer. I could talk forever about friction ridge detail in fingerprint analysis and whether it is an art or a science (for example, DNA of identical twins is identical; we know that based on scientific analysis. But the fingerprints of identical twins differ in their Galton details – which evidence would you rather have if you were a prosecutor? But I digress.) p.20) There are 12 things listed that Jacob can’t stand. Do you see his logic? We all have things we could put into such a list. What would yours be? A powerful and provocative novel about ordinary lives that intersect during a heart-stopping crisis. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.In the bedroom where I’m standing, there’s a whole wall of shelves filled with electronic games. Wii and Xbox, mostly, with a few Nintendo DS tossed in for good measure. We don’t have any gaming systems; we can’t afford them. The crap Jacob has to take at breakfast – a whole extra meal of pills and shots and supplements – costs a fortune, and I know that my mother stays up nights sometimes doing freelance editing jobs just so that she can pay Jess, Jacob’s social skills tutor. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Oliver makes a request for accommodations for Jacob in court. Do they seem fair? The first 5 minutes of the trial show the constant vigilance needed to keep Jacob from having a meltdown and how much Emma does know about her son. Discuss. Jacob blinks at me, expressionless. He lives in a literal world; it’s one of the hallmarks of his diagnosis. Years ago, when we were moving to Vermont, he asked what it was like. Lots of green, I said, and rolling hills. At that, he’d burst into tears. Won’t they hurt us? he’d said.