Harvesting the Heart - Jodi Picoult.

Another Picoult one, but the last one for a while I promise! Harvesting the Heart follows Paige an 18 year old who was raised by her strict Catholic father after her free spirited mother abandoned her. After having a little sex before marriage and a subsequent abortion Paige packs a bag and does a bunk on her good old dependable Dad, who has now been twice abandoned. She sets herself up far away and begins working as a waitress, offering portraits on the side of meals. Then she meets Nicholas a busy, overworked aspiring cardiac surgeon who finds Paige a refreshing change in his life of luxury provided by his parents. Quickly falling in love Nicholas and Paige decide to marry, but his parents withdraw their financial support and the couple are left to work themselves down to put Nicholas through medical school. Once he’s set himself up at a hospital and making a name for himself Paige discovers she is pregnant, but has no bond with the baby growing inside her and begins to question whether she’s even cut out for motherhood.

Baby Max arrives like the second coming of Satan’s son and does nothing but scream, cry and breastfeed poor old Paige raw until she fully gives up on doing literally anything like cooking, cleaning and washing. Tired from surgery Nicholas gets progressively meaner and when Paige accidentally lets Max get hurt she decides she’s fully had enough now and packs off to find her own Mom and discuss her very serious issues.

I mean, it’s feasible, it sounds like something that could well happen and you do have some sympathy for Paige but she goes from being easy going, caring and willing to sacrifice everything for someone else to literally just pissing off and leaving Nicholas with their son, no childcare and not the kind of job he can take a sabbatical from just as he’s on the brink of his career defining moment.

I wasn’t really bothered by Nicholas until Paige returns, then he decides that because he’s managed to keep Max alive for three months by himself (with the help of his his newly returned parents) that Paige is a useless lump who should take a hike and have no access to her son at all.

The book is really all about the issues between Nicholas and Paige and the fact that deep down, they don’t really know each other or marriage until a big hurdle like Max arrives. The ending is pretty ambiguous and I was searching for another chapter to wrap it up much more cleanly. There are other characters, Paige's first love, her Mother and Nicholas' Dad but the only one who is interesting independent of the others is Nicholas' mother. My biggest annoyance is Paige's dad who she abandons and never bothers to visit again, calling in every so often to let him know shes done something huge like get married or have a baby but not bothering to involve him in something he should be involved in. 

I gave it two stars, its readable and interesting but it’s easy to see that its Picoults second novel and whilst it’s much more evolved than Songs of the Humpback Whale it lacks the solid sparkle her later novels have and it doesn’t stand against her stronger works like Nineteen Minutes and My Sisters Keeper.