The Pact by Jodi Picoult

Did everyone have a great Boxing Day ? I know i didn't .

But here's a book to keep you company for the remaining 5 days of 2009 - The Pact .

This book is the story of two high school seniors Chris and Emily . Their families have been neighbors for the past 17 years and practically siblings from Day One . Due to this , neither families are surprised when their supposed 'friendship' develops into something much more in their freshman year , when Emily is 13 and Chris 14 . Everyone around them had thought they were as close to soul mates as anyone could get . But all this changed on a night three months prior to their graduation day - both families are called to the nearby hospital where Chris' s dad works as a doctor where they find Emily dead from a gunshot wound to her head at the age of 17 and Chris unconscious from an unexplained fall , bleeding from the head . When Chris gains consciousness after a couple of hours , he explains that the two of them intended to carry out a suicide pact . Both families are stunned : Chris and Emily were teenagers from loving, relatively wealthy families - their parents naturally thought that since they had everything they needed there was absolutely no reason to be depressed or suicidal . Lacking sufficient evidence, the police takes Chris custody and convicts him of murder of the first degree .

The rest of the book is written in a past-present form , with alternating chapters (every other chapter is a flashback to Emily's and Chris' childhood life leading up to the night of Emily's death, while the others are of Chris' current situation in a holding cell and his lawyer's battle to get him free). It is revealed through the flashbacks that Emily was molested as a child in the local McDonald's as a result of Chris' dare to go into the men's bathroom. It is also revealed that by the time of her death she was two months pregnant with Chris's child but kept it a secret from everybody - her love towards Chris was more sisterly and purely out of duty while Chris truly loved her and thought of her as his soul mate. She chose not to tell anyone of the baby because she believed that Chris would marry her and that they had to step into a readymade life planned out long before by their parents . It was these reasons which made Emily suicidal: she did not wish to go against her parents' wishes of being the perfect daughter with the perfect grades and the perfect boyfriend , yet she already had .

In the end it is further revealed that Emily's death was not a result of their suicide pact and that there never was one . Emily asked Chris to hold the gun for her because she was too cowardly to do it herself.

This was my first Jodi Picoult book and the first book I read I came closest to crying . It was definitely an engrossing and fulfilling read . I especially loved the nail-bitingly suspenseful courtroom drama throughout the end of the book mostly because it was just so realistic . Jodi Picoult has certainly outdone herself in this book and I recommend it to everyone looking for a good book to read in between stressful revision sessions . ( :