The Pact
Jodi Picoult, 1998
Romance Contemporary fictionYoung adult
A small-town Maine novel about first love so certain it becomes dangerous, and the families who have to live with it.
Feels like tenderness and dread. About love, family and death.
A page from the book
The problem with wanting everything to stay exactly as it is.
He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn’t figure out how to get from point A to point B. Jodi Picoult.Picoult studied writing at Princeton and published her first novel in 1992; The Pact, her fifth, appeared in 1998.
Books that feel like this
More by Jodi Picoult
My Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult, 2007
An exploration of ethics and sacrifice when a family's life is determined by a biological lottery.
Mad Honey
Jodi Picoult, 2022
A beekeeper, her hockey-captain son, and the charge that splits a small New Hampshire town — and everything a mother will not let herself see.
The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult, 2013
Jodi Picoult braids a modern moral dilemma with a historical story of survival, asking who gets to tell—and be believed about—the past.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Pact like?
- Feels like tenderness and dread. About love, family and death.
- What should I read after The Pact?
- If you liked The Pact, try Credence (Penelope Douglas), Me Before You (Jojo Moyes) and The Rescue (Nicholas Sparks).
A taste of the feed
When old neglect finds a fresh place to hurt.
I lock my jaw, swallowing the needles in my throat. Over all the years of nannies and boarding schools and summer camps where I was kept busy and raised by anyone but them, I’d found little pain in anything my parents did anymore. But it seems there are still parts of me to hurt.
Credence · Penelope Douglas
What it costs to lose a job you didn't know you loved.
I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb—a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn’t thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.
Me Before You · Jojo Moyes
The quiet belief that raising a child is not quite real work.
So many people these days, it seemed, believed that these things (personal fulfillment and self-esteem) could come only from work, not from parenting, and many people believed that having children had nothing to do with raising them.
The Rescue · Nicholas Sparks
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