The first character introduced is Alex Cormier. Alex is forty years old and lives with her seventeen year old daughter Josie in Sterling, New Hampshire. She is a superior court judge, who had to fight to establish herself in her workplace. From the beginning of the novel, it is clear that her priorities lie in her career rather than as a mother. Alex is extremely proud of her daughter for being exactly the young woman she had hoped, and expects her to be independent.
In the opening scene of the novel when Alex is leaving for work and Josie is leaving for school, there is a clear example that shows how much attention she pays to her daughter. Alex demands for Josie to eat a balanced breakfast but leaves for work before ensuring that she has obeyed this wish. This quote stands out and illustrates how it is normal for Alex to not follow through, causing Josie to disobey her wishes. "She was caught up in a world far away from home, where at that very moment her daughter scraped the scrambled eggs from the skillet into the trash can without ever taking a single bite (Picoult 8)." This quick statement leads the reader to believe that in more instances than eating breakfast, Alex is too consumed with her own life to pay attention to her daughter's.
A few pages later, Alex is mentioned again and is at the court house. As a judge, Alex is held to very high expectations to perform in front of a courtroom full of people. It is clear that she is under a lot of pressure to look right and act right at all times in and outside the workplace. When the setting shifts from the present to seventeen years in the past, the reader gets a glimpse of Alex Cormier's life before Josie was born. The scene shifts to pregnant Alex in the birthing room who hurries out of the class when her pager signals that there was, "something more pressing to deal with (Picoult 26)." This reinforces the thought that Alex has always been more concerned with her job even before Josie was born.
Her priorities are apparent when she mentions that she did not intend to keep the baby. To solidify the overwhelming consumption Alex Cormier has in her career, she states that she missed her abortion appointment twice. This woman is so obsessed with climbing the career ladder that she does not save time or save space in her brain to think about something as serious as an abortion. I hope to see Alex grow as a parent throughout the course of the novel, and to discover reasons that explain her self sufficient persona.
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