When I read Jodi Picoult’s books, I can usually get a pretty good idea of what inspired her for the story.  Some of it is a specific event while other times it may have been a headline that she put a different twist on. In Picture Perfect, I suspect she was standing in line at a supermarket and caught a tabloid headline and put a spin on it.

Cassie Barrett is found in a Los Angeles cemetery, apparently beaten and left there with no memory of who she is or how she got there.  Will Flying Horse is a new officer on the Los Angeles Police Department and helps to take care of her until she discovers who she is and gets her memory back.  The two forge a strong bond that will ultimately be intertwined throughout the story, but not the way one would expect.

For Cassie is an anthropologist married to one of the most powerful and successful actors in Hollywood.  Once that connection is made, her husband, Alex Rivers, reclaims her into their picture-perfect life to try and rediscover who she is.  Unfortunately for Alex, all the memories eventually do come back, including the ones not suitable for his career were they to be learned by the public.

Alex has been physically and emotionally abusive to Cassie for years, yet she took it and justified it.  It wasn’t the money that made it all right in her mind, but the emotional connection between them that was forged early in their relationship.  Cassie has already lost one child due to Alex’s abuse and when she learns she is pregnant again, she turns to the only person she thinks can protect her and her unborn child from his emotional rage: Will.

Unlike books written later in her career, Picture Perfect doesn’t have the degree of social relevance that other stories would have.  Although it touches on domestic abuse and child abuse to a degree, it’s not quite the same as the way she would likely have presented the topic were the book written a few years later.  When Cassie lives among the Sioux Indians, she learns quite a bit that also correlates in some ways to Alex, but the connections are a bit harder to make.  The characters are interesting but don’t have the same depth as other characters, despite Picoult spending plenty of time giving us their background.  I didn’t feel like I knew them the way I knew her characters in other books.

With the exception of Will and an earlier friend, Connor, it would seem Cassie has a penchant for picking people who will hurt her.  Even her so-called best friend, Ophelia, will use her and treat her like crap throughout the novel.  Why she does this isn’t as evident as it should be.  Yes, she didn’t have the greatest childhood, but so did a lot of other people.  The connection isn’t really made as to why she jumped from point A to point B and why when Will and his family show her generosity and another way to live despite adversity, she seems to be able to put that goodness behind her all too easily.

By making the two main characters utterly filthy rich and famous rather than an everyday man and woman, it also serves to distance the reader from feeling empathy for them.  I ended up thinking Cassie was stupid to stay with him, regardless of whether she was pregnant or not.  He showed remorse, but he had no compunction about beating her to within an inch of her life.  Was I supposed to feel sorry for her? It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who has more resources at her disposal than most when women with so much less can manage to stand up for themselves.

I didn’t burn through Picture Perfect the way I usually read a Jodi Picoult novel, largely because with the exception of Will, I found it hard to care about the characters.  I could see Picoult looking at the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston split and wondering what would have happened were she leaving him because of abuse, because that’s exactly what the book reads like.  If you’re someone who soaks up that kind of gossip, I’d say give this another star and go for it.  For me, it was a great topic that doesn’t get the same treatment she would have given it just a few years later.