Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult (audio)

★★★★

"Every life has a soundtrack."

After one miscarriage too many, Max and Zoe's marriage of nine years is over.  After the divorce, Max struggles with alcoholism and goes to live with his brother, Reed, and sister-in-law, Libby.  He takes a turn for the worst and then becomes involved in their church.Zoe spends her time focusing on her career as a music therapist.  While working with a troubled teen at a high school, Zoe strikes up a close friendship with Vanessa, the school guidance counselor.  Their friendship slowly turns into a romantic one and the Zoe beings a new chapter in her life.  After Zoe and Vanessa are married, they decide they want to have a baby.  Struggling to have a child with Max, there are still three frozen embryos left from the fertility treatments.  Since Zoe can no longer have children, Vanessa plans to use the embryos to have their.  There is just one problem - Max has to sign off at the clinic and his new religious beliefs do not support Zoe's life style and raising a child in a save-sex marriage.

This novel brought up a lot of different issues.  The main ones, of course, was gay rights and what constitutes as a good family.  Max is forced to make hard decisions about the future of his unborn children.  There are also a lot of questions about what is considered to be a child, what rights the children have, and who gets to decide those rights.  

All in all, I enjoyed the book.  It was really interesting to see the different perspectives from each character.  I felt that the author was a little too "black-and-white" though.  I felt that there was too much focus on religion being a bad thing.  Just because someone is religious, doesn't automatically mean they are against gay rights.  Is it wishfully thinking that both can exist?  Maybe, but I felt that some of Max's story was a little far fetched and focused on the wrong aspects.  Throughout the book, I kept trying to form an opinion, but I ultimately decided that I couldn't really form one without considering all of the options.  And that just lead me to ask more questions.  I guess that's what a good book does - force you to ask more questions.  

Also, the book included a soundtrack of music that was played through the novel.  All of the songs were written specifically for the book.  Since Zoe was a music therapist and music was a big part of her life, this worked perfectly!  I'm glad that I listened to the audio book - otherwise I might have missed a lot of the songs.