The Pact - movie based on book by Picoult - this evening on lifetime.
good dad. and, like Ordinary People, an unhappy mother who is harder to sympathize with.
who needs something for her self-esteem from her children.
daughter writes in diary that mom's life would be over when her little girl grows up.

I skimmed the book a year or two ago.
Pub Weekly: Chris Harte and Em Gold bonded as infants; their parents have been next-door neighbors and best friends for 18 years. When they fall in love, everyone is ecstatic. Everyone, it turns out, except for Em, who finds that sex with Chris feels almost incestuous. Her emotional turmoil, compounded by pregnancy, which she keeps secret, leads to depression, despair and a desire for suicide, and she insists that Chris prove his love by pulling the trigger.
Cust Rvw: The copy I bought has a sticker on it saying, "Now a Lifetime Original Movie". Well, it sure read like one. Not a bad premise for a story, but the execution just didn't cut it for me. I didn't find the characters believable or sympathetic, especially the romantic relationships. And the writing was mediocre, and overly cliche'-ed. Ironically (?) enough, there were some minor errors that really irked me. She wrote that Chris drove around a corner and slammed his stick shift car into park. Well, stick shift cars don't have park. And then one of the characters was flying to Paris, though New York's LaGuardia airport. But, LaGuardia isn't an international airport. And then Chris' English essay was referred to as being "pro-choice", which it definitely was NOT. I suppose these are things that an editor/agent should be catching, but it just sort of makes me feel even more than this was a production-mill kind of story--got an idea? Good, let's churn out a book as fast as we can and make a TV movie out of it. I picked it up expecting some mildly entertaining fluffy reading for a weekend. I got fluffy reading, but next time I'm in the mood for some weekend reading, I won't be stopping by the Picoult shelf.
The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan: Unfortunately, [Picoult] burrows no deeper into this promising story than the legal-page-turner formula allows. that's as I remember. (~her plots are intriguing -- if there was more psychological nuance, could be so interesting as stories. )
appears she's a marketing machine (does't sound like a person!): see her amazon page.



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it was a happy day in the mailroom.