Books : Change of Heart: A Novel

Rating: - Ms. Picoult and religion don't mix.
(Spoiler alert) One of Jodi Picoult's many strengths is her ability to fully flesh out characters--to breathe life into them for her readers. In her book, Change of Heart, I was disappointed to see her unable to live up to the high standards she has successfully achieved in so many of her other books. Change of Heart purports to take a serious look at serious believers. But Jodi's bias against religious faith turns her religious characters into weak, vacillating, and confused caricatures. On the other hand, her agnostic or atheistic characters deliver eloquent diatribes against belief and believers. Just as she did in her book, Keeping Faith, Jodi creates a circus full of fringe character true believing "nut cases" that stupidly gather around to clog traffic and fight with each other while waiting to witness miracles--miracles that exist in the lives of her key protagonists. Then in the final scenes of both books, she weakly attempts to show that the protagonists possess no spiritual gifts at all. Of course not. How could they? In Jodi's world, there are no such people. Jodi's bias against religion renders her unable to create strong, three-dimensional people of faith and renders her unable to create books where faith has a fighting chance against her unbelief. Perhaps a real miracle for a future Jodi Picoult book will be the miracle of creating religious characters with the same depth and respect that she does her non-believing characters.

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Rating: - boring and confusing
this book was hard for me to belive. shay did not have his own chapters and we only learned what he felt or said from other characters. he could not have been as unitelligent as it said becuase he put sentences together. why did he always get seizures and did he have a religous background?there were a lot of pages written for maggie, the priest and the guy in prison. I would have liked to read chapters from claire's point of view but we only got one chapter at the end. the priest gets a package at the end from shay with a copy of the gospel and three packages of bazooka which makes me think that he did not stretch out one piece like he was some miracle worker. june did not get fully devolped. the relgion was boring. i skimmed a lot of it.

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Rating: - excellent book
This is one of the best books I have read. It reminds me of The Green Mile. She tells this story from different viewpoints. She includes ideas from a rabbi, a priest and the gnostic scriptures. Her characters are well developed and believable. I loved this book and did not want it to end.

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Rating: - Disappointing Book
I was first introduced to Jodi Piccoult when I read "The Plain Truth." I have read numerous other works by her and my favorite was "My Sister's Keeper" - Great Book. But this book is very disappointing. I felt like I was reading a remake of the Stephen King novel "The Green Mile", but unfortunately I did not enjoy any of the characters, as in King's novel where John Coffey was likeable immediately.
Jodi usually has GREAT character development, and that is one aspect of her writing that is so wonderful,but she missed the mark it in this novel.
I hoped she would have deveoped June Nealon and her daugter Claire deeper, and perhaps she does later in the novel. However I stopped reading it after 114 pages. I do not care for any of the characters -especially Maggie.
I feel Jodi missed the mark of this novel, but have not given up on her. I know I will read her next one and hopefully it will be better - i.e. the characters will be more likeable.

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Rating: - Overall solid Picoult
I have yet to read a Jodi Picoult novel that I outright dislike. She always tells her story well and makes me anxious to keep reading. That said, I definately saw a few too many shades of Stephen Kings "The Green Mile" and Picoults own "Keeping Faith". I did enjoy the info/history lesson about the Gnostics and am actually interested now in reading more. However, I have not read much about Picoult personally and am now curious about her own religious beliefs. I felt like they were pushing through in this one.

For Picoult fans- SPOILER ALERT- there was a bit of predictability in this one. I could see the romance and "perfection" of Christian coming from a mile away. I also guesses/predicted that Kurt had been abusing Elizabeth from the moment the murders and Shay's involvement were introduced.

All that said, I still give it four stars simply because it was very readable, kept me reading and I overall enjoyed reading it. While not as deep as some of her others- or many books out there in general- she offers enough to keep "Change of Heart" from being fluff and guilt-free for me, the reader :-)