Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

I am here to make an announcement! As a lover of great books and a frequent reader, this was my FIRST Jodi Picoult book!

Many of my friends have said, “You have to read Jodi Picoult books!” or “You mean to tell me YOU, have never read a Picoult book?” and in truth, I hadn’t explored this latest craze in the world of popular authors! So there I was in December in Belleville, Michigan at the Scholastic Warehouse buying books for my classroom when I wandered into the “Adult books” section (no, not Adult Entertainment, it’s a book fair for kids) and found this story. As I have said many times before, I prefer to read books that I will remember long after I put the book down and in this case, Change of Heart is one I will probably never forget.

Picoult tells the story through the help of many of the novel’s characters. We follow June Nealon, a mother who has lost her daughter and second husband to homicide. Their killer you ask? Well, he is another one of the Picoult’s narrators, Shay Bourne. As Shay spends his eleven years on execution row we hear from other prison inmates like Lucerne, an AIDS victim who Bourne appears to help medically from his prison cell. We hear from Maggie Bloom, Bourne’s attorney from the ACLU and we hear from Father Michael, a priest assigned to help Bourne prepare for his execution.

Picoult has an amazing way of telling a dark story with a complicated web in a way that makes a reader want to keep reading. You want to hear Shay Bourne plead his case in court, not for survival, but to donate his organs. You want to hear June Nealon tell about her daughter Claire’s worsening health condition as her heart begins to fail. You want to know if Maggie Bloom will be the lawyer that will convince a judge to grant Shay a hanging instead of lethal injection so that he may attempt to fix a wrong in having killed one Nealon daughter years back, now fighting so hard to have his heart transplanted into Claire, to save the other Nealon daughter. You want to know if Bourne’s organs will instead be lost as it appears he will be executed through lethal injection. After following Shay as our narrator you will long to hear him tell his side of the story, of the night a young girl and her stepfather cop were killed. You want to know how this story ends.

Your daughter needs a heart transplant to live, would you take the heart of a convicted killer? Would you take the heart of a man who killed your husband and eldest daughter?

Your eyes will pop when the story ends and you may even shake your head in disbelief…

What a book! What a storyline! This was intense to read and kept my mind racing at night. I will read more Picoult books, but if they are all this intense, I may need to spread them out with other books in between. Picoult truly has a talent.