Sing You Home

Sing You Home

Jodi Picoult

Genre: Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): One miscarriage too many spelled the end of Max and Zoe Baxter's marriage. Though the former couple went quite separate ways, their fates remained entangled: After veering into alcoholism, Max is saved in multiple senses by his fundamentalist conversion; Zoe, for her part, finds healing relief in music therapy and the friendship, then romantic love with Vanessa, her counselor. After Zoe and Vanessa, now married, decide to have a baby, they realize that they must join battle with Max, who objects on both religious and financial grounds. Like her House Rules and several other previous Jodi Picoult novels, Sing You Home grapples with hot button issues. The novel also includes a CD of songs, each matched with a chapter in the book. Perfect for book clubs

Review: I generally find Jodi Picoult's books to be easy to read and hard to put down - Sing You Home was no different. The subject matter was certainly controversial; I would not recommend this book to conservative family members.  Overall, I really enjoyed Sing You Home and was tempted to give it five stars.  The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that there were a few issues that really bothered me.  The timing was extremely rushed, for no apparent reason.  I would have found the story more believable if more than a month passed between the time Zoe got divorced and the time she realized she was a lesbian, not to mention that she decided to get married to Vanessa a month after that.  Who would act that quickly even if she wasn't experiencing a major change in her sexuality?  And I did not care for Picoult's treatment of Christians, who were all portrayed as completely judgmental and fanatical.  Generally, I think Picoult does a good job trying to make the reader sympathize with both sides of the story, but in this book, the Christians were clearly the villains.

Rating: 4 stars