SING YOU HOME (Jodi Picoult) - June 30/11

Sing You Home follows Picoult's formula to an almost laughable extent, and yet I found that I quite enjoyed this book. It's actually quite unpredictable in its early stages - I never would have guessed that Zoe would turn gay, for example - and the characters are all extremely vivid and three dimensional. The shifting perspectives does tend to wreak havoc on the momentum, however, with the stuff from Max's point of view not faring nearly as well as Zoe and Vanessa's chapters. And the expected court case isn't nearly as interesting as the human stuff, with Picoult's decision to offer up several pages to the scientific background of homosexual tendencies proving rather disastrous. But I nevertheless found myself getting choked up at the ideal ending, which might be a little predictable but refreshingly allows every character to get what they wanted. *** out of ****