Christina Reviews *Sing You Home* by Jodi Picoult

           **1/2

          In the beginning of the book, Zoe Baxter wants to have a baby with her husband but can’t.  After several failed pregnancies, her husband can’t take it anymore, and so he divorces her.  They still have some frozen embryos left in a fertility clinic, but he has given up.

        Not long after the divorce, the husband, Max, has a near-fatal accident and comes to know God.  The ex-wife, Zoe, falls in love with a woman and comes to know gay marriage. 

        Zoe and her spouse Vanessa want to have a child together.  More specifically, they want to use one of Zoe’s and Max’s frozen embryos because Zoe would really like to have her child be biologically related to her.   She can’t grow the baby inside her own womb any more because she had to have a hysterectomy, so the embryo would be placed inside of Vanessa.  The only problem is that they need Max’s permission to do this.  And when Max finds out, not only is he dead-set against his child being raised by lesbians, he’s determined to take the embryo away from Zoe and give it to his infertile brother and sister-in-law because another belief of his is that the embryo has a right to life.

         Picoult puts twists in at the end just for the sake of putting in twists.  There was at least one twist that didn’t amount to anything and so I don’t know why Picoult even put it in there.

         This is a book that has a sweet ending, but we arrive at the sweet ending by being forced to accept the fact that sometimes the characters who inhabit Picoult’s fictional world have no reason to behave consistently.  And most of the characters, particularly the religious extremists, are boring and trite.

         This was an OK book but nothing special.