Sing You Home

About Sing You Home

Zoe Baxter has spent years trying to have a child with her husband Max—three rounds of IVF, three miscarriages, one stillbirth. When a final pregnancy fails, Max breaks down in ways he cannot explain or control, and the marriage ends. Zoe, rebuilding her life as a music therapist, falls in love with her colleague Vanessa. When Zoe and Vanessa marry and decide they want to use the frozen embryos from Zoe's first marriage to start a family, Max—now a member of an evangelical church—goes to court to stop them.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 2011, Sing You Home arrived during an especially heated period in the national conversation about same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and when an embryo constitutes a person. Picoult assembled the legal questions with care, consulting with attorneys specializing in reproductive technology and constitutional law. The novel is not a polemic—both Zoe and Max are rendered with complexity, and the evangelical community Max joins is shown from the inside rather than caricatured.

The novel comes packaged with a CD of original songs written and performed by Picoult's collaborator Ellen Wilber, which correspond to different emotional chapters in Zoe's story. Music therapy is central to the plot, not ornamental—Zoe's work with patients, the specific ways she uses music to reach people who are not reachable through other means, is detailed and substantive.

Love, Religion, and the Legal Status of Frozen Embryos

The central legal question of the novel—what rights, if any, an ex-spouse has over frozen embryos from a marriage that has ended—is genuinely unresolved in American law. Picoult positions the case in a state where the answer is not obvious, and constructs the arguments on both sides with sufficient rigor that readers who arrive with strong views often find themselves understanding the opposing position in new ways.

Max's conversion to evangelical Christianity is handled with sympathy for what he needed from it, even as the novel is critical of the way his church uses that need. He is not simply a villain. He is a man whose grief about the lost pregnancies was never processed, and the church gave him somewhere to put it.

Why Sing You Home Has Been Challenged

Sing You Home has been challenged in 1 state and 4 districts tracked in this catalog. Challenges cite the novel's positive portrayal of a lesbian marriage, sexual content, and the book's treatment of evangelical Christianity—which challengers from that community describe as hostile. The novel also deals explicitly with infertility and pregnancy loss, which some challenges note as inappropriate for younger readers. These are exactly the subjects that need thoughtful, serious fiction: families experiencing infertility, LGBTQ teens seeing their lives in books, and any reader grappling with where religious belief and reproductive rights intersect.