House Rules

The first time I tried to write on House Rules nothing came to mind. My solution? Put off my homework and take to the kitchen and prepare more food for the week. I already had sweet potatoes boiling in the kitchen and they starting to get too soft. Flipping through some recipes, I decided on "Tropical Sweet Potato Fries" (http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Tropical-Sweet-Potato-Fries/Detail.aspx). After letting them steam dry, I removed the skins, chopped, and tossed them onto an oiled baking sheet. It was when I was coating them with olive oil that I thought to myself, "Jacob would go ballistic if he were here right now." For those of you who don't know, sweet potatoes are about as orange as you can get, and to top it off, I was using a rubber, orange brush to coat the potatoes with oil. Here I am, preparing food for the week and would never have known that Asperger's syndrome might make sweet potatoes inedible. From this book I am enlightened on the every day challenges of someone on this spectrum of Autism.

I believe this book isn't so much about who killed Olgivery, but instead about the difficulties faced by the "extraordinary". My housemate walked into the living room, and after seeing that House Rules was written by Jessica Picoult said "Oh, she wrote My Sister's Keeper. That author always writes about those challenged with health issues". Granted, that was a generalization, I flipped to the last few pages by accident and saw the last chapter labeled "My Brother's Keeper". With this commonality, I'm guessing there are other reoccurring themes such as sibling relationships in the face of disease, syndromes, etc. Her writing is valuable, I think, because it educates the masses on Asperger's syndrome which would otherwise only be in textbooks.