-Plain Truth-

Plain Truth is the book I just finished reading, it’s by Jodie Picoult. It tells about a teenage Amish girl, Katie Fisher, who is being charged for a new born baby murder who supposedly belongs to her. Katie, however, keeps insisting that she has never murdered the new born, even she admitted not to ever get pregnant in the first place. She eventually is pushed to the corner as all medical evidence lead all the state to the fact that she has recently delivered a baby and the fact that she might have something to do with the death of that infant. In the court, Katie is being helped by a brilliant attractive attorney, Ellie Hathaway to whom Katie can talk to, to reveal the truer truth.

Through the story we are brought to see how Amish-men live their simplicity of life. Amish is an obedient German Christian tribe in USA who live in small village with all the simplicity of religious life. If you are an Amish, you do not call your friend with cell-phone, do not go to the movie, you do not watch gossips on TV, you live with no electricity, and you do not travel by a car, neither go to college. You work at the farm and serve the church after all and Amish, they don’t lie, which make all absurd for Katie Fisher to have a baby out of wedlock, even committing a murder.

I like the plot of Plain Truth. It portrays the details of Katie’s life as an Amish and her little experience in ‘English’ world. Through which I feel like to see how what’s right can be perceived in different ways. I mean sometimes as you try to do and say the right thing but in the wrong place, it might appear not to be what it’s supposed to be or it could be not the right thing to say. Like sometimes you just have to keep the truth for yourself, because after all, you might not need anyone to define for you about you either tell the truth or lies. Those are coming from the fact (particularly in the novel) that in human justice (in the novel it is the ‘English’ court), the truth can be just a result of a winning-battle argument and the trial as the battlefield. Practically saying, it can be such shifting idea about law and court as a place to find justice and defend the truth, but instead, it can be merely the war of the prosecutor against the attorney to serve a more convincing story of such crime for the judge to decide the punishment. So the truth itself can be very bias, and after all we are not in the capacity of giving a judgment, moreover, a punishment.

It tells also about how forgiving could be so easy, which is I know in real life it could be the hardest thing to do. Sometimes your ego won’t let yourself to let it go, by which you will never be able to move forward from all your pain, anger, and suffering. And in the end of the day, it’s just you, your ego, who will hurt yourself, not people who begged you for forgiveness in the first place.
About un-judging point of view towards people; about who they are and the acts that they do, for we gotta to know that they should have reason why they do so, which maybe beyond our thoughts. And it’s about how far you would defend your faith which might define who you are and stick to it.

Three and a half for Plain Truth, and I look forward to another Picoult’s, Tenth Circle.