Change of Heart

Change of Heart is Jodi Picoult’s 2008 novel, which sits in the middle of the prolific stretch of her career when she was producing a major book almost every year. Like most of her work, the novel is built around a difficult moral question, told from multiple perspectives, with characters on different sides of an issue that rarely has a clean answer. In this case the question involves the death penalty, organ donation, and the limits of forgiveness.

The central plot follows June Nealon, a woman whose husband and daughter were murdered by their handyman Shay Bourne eleven years earlier. Shay is on death row in New Hampshire, scheduled to be executed soon. June’s surviving daughter Claire needs a heart transplant. Shay decides he wants to donate his heart to Claire as a final act before his death. The state and the medical establishment are not equipped for what he is asking, and the novel digs into the legal, religious, and personal complications that follow.

Picoult layers in additional perspectives. A young lawyer who takes on Shay’s case. A Catholic priest with a complicated past. A member of the prison chaplain staff. The rotating chapters allow Picoult to explore the question of whether Shay is having a religious experience, whether he is mentally ill, whether he is a saint, or whether he is simply a man trying to do one good thing before he dies. The Christ imagery in the novel is heavy and intentional, and it has been one of the more divisive elements of the book among critics.

Readers who liked My Sister’s Keeper or Nineteen Minutes will find Picoult working in familiar territory here. Change of Heart is one of her more emotionally demanding novels, but it is also one of her most thoughtful.