Change of Heart

About Change of Heart

Shay Bourne was convicted of murdering a police officer and his stepdaughter and sentenced to death. Eleven years later, he sits on death row in New Hampshire—where something strange has begun to happen around him. Prisoners report inexplicable events. A man on death row asks to donate his heart to the eleven-year-old daughter of the man he killed, who is dying of a heart condition. The girl's mother, June, who has spent a decade building her life around hating Shay Bourne, must now decide whether to accept.

Change of Heart, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, is structured around a deceptively simple question: can we be saved? The novel examines that question from every angle—legal, religious, biological, personal—without settling it. Picoult weaves in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, deliberate parallels to the life of Jesus, and a cast that includes a death row minister, a civil liberties attorney, and a journalist who covered the original trial. The story is built to force the reader to keep revising their judgment of every character.

June is perhaps the novel's most difficult and rewarding character. She is not required to be a saint about what has happened to her. Her resistance to Shay's request is completely understandable, and the novel does not punish her for it—which makes the moments when she begins to soften feel genuinely earned rather than morally coerced.

Faith, Justice, and the Law

The structural tension of the novel is the gap between what the law can process and what individual people actually experience. A state can execute a man. It cannot require a mother to forgive him, or prevent a dying child from hoping. The legal and emotional plots run on parallel tracks that never fully converge, and that is the point: there are questions that courtrooms cannot answer.

The novel's engagement with religion is serious rather than sentimental. The parallels between Shay and Christ are not subtle, but the novel is not making a theological argument—it is asking what it would actually mean, today, in a prison, if something miraculous were happening, and how every institution around it would respond.

Why Change of Heart Has Been Challenged

Change of Heart has been challenged in 1 state and 5 districts tracked in this catalog. Objections most frequently cite the novel's treatment of religion—particularly its Gnostic references and its complex, ambivalent relationship to Christianity—as well as mature content related to prison life and violence. A book that takes faith seriously enough to interrogate it will always unsettle readers whose faith does not want to be interrogated.