I'll Sing YOU Home, Jodi.

On sunday afternoon, I had some friends and family over for a little pre-birthday lunch celebration.  My mum made a fabulous Greek meal (lemon chicken, roasted potatoes, rice, greek salad, pita bread with tzatziki and hummus, YUM!), and my dad picked me out an ice cream cake with the Canucks logo on it.  Golden.


My aunt and uncle gave me two books for my birthday.  One, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, was quoted from by UBC's Chancellor Sarah Morgan-Silvester at my congregation, so I'm very excited to read that one (blog to follow!), the other is Jodi Picoult's most recent publication, Sing You Home.  


The only thing I knew about this book going into it (aside from the fact that it would likely be a Picoult staple) was that it had some musical flair to it.  From glancing at the little cover flap teasers, I further discovered that one of the main characters was a music therapist, and that the novel covered the themes of "identity, love, marriage and parenthood".

So I dove in without many expectations. My first surprise was before the first page.  Picoult has included with this novel a 10 track audio CD that corresponds with the 10 sections of her book.  She wrote the lyrics, and some other woman wrote and performed the melody.  There's a little info about it before the book begins, explaining how the text is split up so that you can listen to each track as you go along, but that there's no right or wrong way to incorporate the music.  For me, I couldn't be bothered to stop the flow of reading to pop on a CD between sections, so I actually have yet to listen to it.  I'm also a bit scared that it will be bad...but when I get around to it, I'll share my thoughts.

So now a disclaimer of sorts, I obviously won't give away anything big, as some of my reader's might care to give this book a go, but if you think you might want to read it, and want absolutely NO info about it, even generic, then you should probably stop reading now.

Alright.  So I wasn't all too surprised with Picoult's structural decisions for this, her latest novel.  She uses her go to method: multiple narrators distinguished by different fonts.  One thing she did a little different (Albeit, only once) that I liked was having the same period of time described from two different characters.  For the most part though, she sticks to her classic style of splitting the timeline of her text between a few specific narrators.

The novel starts of with the point of view of Zoe, the music therapist character.  She's 28 weeks preggers at the time.  So off the bat, I thought this was going to be a story about raising kidlets or something.  Sadly, Zoe's pregnancy doesn't work out, and the novel gets thrown in an absolutely different direction.

I was caught completely off guard by the way it went, so good job Jodi.  I also tend to be a fairly lazy reader though, in that I purposely don't predict outcomes of storylines, because I like to be surprised.   The "unexpected friendship that blossoms into love"described on the front cover turns out to be between Zoe and her friend Vanessa.  SURPRISE! Lesbian-Lovers.

So thats all good. Vanessa is another narrator we hear from.  We also get the POV of Max, Zoe's ex-husband, who transforms from an alcoholic surfer dude to a born-again Christian who excepts Jesus as his lord and saviour.  So when Zoe and Vanessa decide they want to raise a baby using the frozen embryos left over from Zoe and Max's IVF stuff, you can imagine that the proverbial shit hits the fan.

Picoult had me going until the first courtroom scene, when I went "Ohhhh, right.  Lawyers."

I felt like it was a bit of a new direction for Picoult though, to delve into an issue as contemporary as gay rights, and I enjoyed her portrayal of how an issue like this might play out in a family court case.

The ending is a bit of a face-to-palm moment though, which I feel is in true Picoult fashion.  Sigh.

There is a wedding in a bowling alley though, which is awesome.

If any of my faithful readers decide to give this one a read, let me know what you think of it!