Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult.

                    Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult.

"What if he is the Messiah? Aren't we morally obliged to save his life if he's here to save the world?"

This is Jodi's 15th novel delving into lots of serious moral issues about capital punishment and organ donation. You'll also experience some interesting discussion on religion and spirituality from different religious denominations as well as the atheists and gnostics. It raises questions over whether religion makes us more or less tolerant and whether what we believe is always the truth. Is religion divisive or does it unite?

Following the modern trend, there are multiple-narrators and they are credible characters questioning life and suffering.
June is the most tragic person having lost her first husband in a car accident. Daughter Elizabeth and June miraculously survived. She was inconsolable but a policeman called Kurt was there to comfort her and she grew to love him so in time they married. Shay Bourne, a vagrant, comes looking for work and June reluctantly takes him on. His arrival was unexpected just like a flyer from a summer carnival that blusters in on a winter wind.
Heavily pregnant with Claire, June returns from antenatal to discover a shoot-out in her home, Elizabeth and Kurt the casualties. Shay Bourne was convicted of double murder. Kurt Nealon had been shot in the line of duty after attempting to arrest Bourne after being found with Elizabeth, her underwear in his pocket.
"Blood splattered her face and matted her hair; her eyes were still wide open. Her dress, hiked up when she had fallen, showed that she was naked from the waist down."

Michael is a math student writing his thesis when he is called to the jury for what was considered the crime of the century. It was the kind of crime that demanded the death penalty, the first time in 58 years. Michael was about the same age as the accused and he makes a chilling remark that he could easily have been Bourne and vice-versa. The evidence seemed conclusive and indisputable that Bourne was guilty of committing a heinous crime but should he be injected with a lethal dose? The jury had to make that decision. Michael was the last juror to be persuaded it was the right choice.

Shay Bourne was bounced around the foster care system and he had a sister he hadn't seen since he was 16. He had set alight to his foster home and his foster father had perished. For this he served 2 years in a juvenile detention facility. He had untreated bipolar disorder and poor reading, writing and language skills. He accepted his fate and was resolved to die but he needed redemption.

Eleven years later he joins I-tier alongside Lucius, Calloway Rees, Texas Wridell, Pogie Simmons and Crash. Michael becomes a priest and Bourne's spiritual comforter, Maggie, an atheist, represents him as well as plugging her own cause-raising enough awareness of the death penalty. She wants to protect Bourne's religious freedoms when he requests that his heart be donated to June's ailing daughter Claire, once he has been executed.
June is presented with an untenable moral dilemma: what kind of mother would she be if she let that monster donate his heart OR what kind of a mother would she be if she turned it down and let her surviving daughter die? A change of heart is needed for both June as well as Claire and the New Jersey state.

With Bourne's arrival to I-tier some very strange things happen. So-called miracles caused people to feel extremely uncomfortable about this murderer. Who was he?
"They were nothing like Jesus's-or were they? Water into wine. feeding many with virtually nothing. Healing the sick. making the blind-or in Calloway's case, the prejudiced-see." More than 500 people camped outside the prison calling him a saviour.
It's about finding out the truth and this can be disturbing especially when life is built on deception so if you want something comforting you'll find Change of Heart can offer you that.

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton   ISBN: 978-0340-935842


Copyright 2014. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this article review is reproduced.

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