Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult

Synopsis:

This is a fiction book. It is a story of a dead infant on an Amish farm. The baby is not stillborn but died shortly after birth and was born prematurely and could have died from natural causes due to listeria, which Katie contracted due to drinking unpasteurized milk.

Katie Fisher, an eighteen year old, unmarried Amish girl, is charged with the murder. However, Katie denies being pregnant. Ellie Hathaway, a defense attorney and distant relative of Katie, reluctantly agrees to defend Katie and has to stay on the farm with Katie prior to the trial.

She starts a relationship with her former boyfriend, Coop, a legal psychologist, whom Ellie had left years before, and eventually finds out that she is pregnant with his child. Coop proposes to Ellie, but she initially defers his proposal.

Katie settles for a plea agreement and is sentenced to one year of electronic monitoring which allows her to stay at the farm. Katie’s mother, Sarah Fisher, gives Ellie the scissors that were used to cut the umbilical cord and knew that Katie was pregnant and went to her the night she gave birth. Although Ellie is ethically obligated to provide this evidence to the police, she does not, and the book ends with Coop picking up Ellie from their dairy farm to start their lives together.

Review:

I very much enjoyed this book and found it to be very heartwarming and intriguing.

“Love’s the strongest kind of energy. Katie and I loved each other. We couldn’t love each other in my world, and we couldn’t love each other in her world. But all that love, all that energy, it had to go somewhere. It went into that baby. Even if we couldn’t have each other, we would have both had him.”

“He kissed her gently, and she wondered how you come so close to a person that there was not a breath of space between you, and still feel like a canyon had ripped the earth raw between your feet.”

“She wanted him to tell her that when you love someone so hard and so fierce, it was alright to do things that you knew were wrong.”

“Energy can’t be destroyed, only converted into something different. So when a person dies, where does that energy go?”