this was not a believable story in the least, but I was interested in the characters. Brown wrote good descriptions and presented interesting analogies. She also made me think about possibilities in difficult situations. I appreciated how she ended the book considering how many paths she could have taken. This was about a middle class family whose mother is a pediatrician, father is a sculptor, and the son is 16 and daughter 11. Many times people acted either older or younger than they were, but that also fiut the story. And this is another story that shows the importance of theatre in the court of law, which also is quite sad. ( )

Incredible book. Worst nightmare for a parent. ( )

A well-imagined look at what happens to an upper middle class family in a small New Hanpshire town when their adolescent son who has never been in trouble before Is suspected of killing his girlfriend. A page-turner, and an achievement in characterization. ( )

Son accused of murdering girlfriend
Pg. 179 - "profound disconnection" a warning one day her son next day a person meet in public places
Pg 263
"These are not people who love you."
Pg 376 - everything shifts around when someone is missing. - all pull together, at home more a chill elsewhere
Pg 349 -
Jacob - not thriving - holding on - ... driving forklift - not what we predicted for him.

Carolyn and Ben Reiser moved to Hyland, New Hampshire with their two children for the comforts of rural life. But when the local police chief comes looking for their seventeen-year-old son Jacob to question him about the brutal murder of his girlfriend, the Reisers' lives begin to unravel.

“[S]crew what really happened! What’s it going to take for you to get this? ‘The truth’ in a courtroom is just a construction of effects. It’s theater. There is no such thing as simple truth, as long as its presentation can be shaped, or perverted, or invented, even. Not the facts, mind you. I’m talking presentation. Either side can skew the way things appear, and how they appear is all that matters.”

[Before and After], by Rosellen Brown, is not about what really happened. But life is rarely about what really happened. What really happened, the event that creates the plot of the book, is in doubt until the closing section of the book. What Brown focuses on throughout the story is how everyone is affected – the lives of the characters [Before and After].

Rosellen Brown captures this transformation vividly through the eyes of three people – the mother, father, and sister of an accused murderer, Jacob, an otherwise typically rebellious and angry American teenager. Carolyn, Jacob’s mother and a doctor in their small town, is the first to feel the ugly caress of violence when she is summoned to the Emergency Room to attend the body of a teen-aged girl who was brutally and fatally beaten. The girls head is caved in and her, her sad, lifeless body is laid out on a gurney. There are few things more offensive than the view of a human body so recently departed of its quickening force, its soul, if you believe in such a thing. No matter the severity of the wounds – they can be gruesome or invisible altogether – there is a shameful absurdity in looking at what was recently a breathing, thinking, and feeling human and is now nothing more than a sack of meat. Carolyn, without knowing about Jacob’s involvement, views the victim’s body and detaches herself from the emotion of it, a luxury she soon loses. Jacob’s father, Ben, a sculptor and angry man himself, next feels the transformative genius of violence, finding in the trunk of Jacob’s car a jack covered in blood and hair. Ben embraces the emotion of the discovery, protecting Jacob, who he assumes is guilty, by hiding and destroying the evidence. Finally, Judith, Jacob’s younger sister, an almost forgotten casualty of the crime, realizes that the behavior she found frightening in her brother might be the tip of a much more disturbing iceberg.

Superman, one of America’s oldest and most iconic superheroes, fights for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” That belief in a satisfying and rehabilitative closure in seeing bad men brought law in justice, while appealing, is a whole-cloth myth. The courts are full to bursting with the wronged and the evil, the innocent and the culpable. What so few people understand is that there is little justice and even less truth once you push through the over-sized wooden doors of a courtroom. What resides there is made up of what people can be made to believe, what people are willing to believe, or what people want to believe – not what can be proven. What does it matter if proof exists but no one can be convinced of its validity and worth?

This construct, the very bedrock of our system of justice, bleeds into everyday life. Victims and accused find that their lives outside those cruel doors have the same surreal quality. Family, life-long friends, casual acquaintances, and even strangers treat them differently, whether they are the ones who suffered the crime or are accused of committing it – they are perceived differently by everyone once they are caught in the net of violence. Perception has shifted, in their minds and all around them. And it will never retrieve the same angle as it had before.

What makes Brown’s examination of this transformation in Jacob’s family so evocative is that she writes about it from their own personal perspective rather than from a neutral, all-knowing narrator’s perspective. Carolyn views the events through her detached and impersonal doctor’s eyes, and her narrative is the coldest, but appropriately so. Ben, immediately awash in every emotion that surfaces, is the most vital, and Brown tells it from the first-person, as though Ben was sitting next to you, relaying the events of a few hours or minutes past. And Judith, tells her story almost as she might in a diary, chronicling the personal events of her days as she sees them, forgotten by her family and left to process everything without the necessary experience that a few more years of life would give her.

Bottom Line: A realistic and personal look at the loss of innocence at the hands of justice – much more provocative than a mystery for its perspective.

4 1/2 bones!!!!! ( )