Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by Catherine

If you'd like to be able to easily share your reviews with others, please join BookBrowse.
Order Reviews by:
Sing You Home: A Novel
by Jodi Picoult
Good idea - but poorly executed - a lot of LGBTQ stereotypes (3/6/2022)
I never feel the need to write reviews and I've read nearly almost all of Jodi Picoults work, some are incredibly moving and great, others not so.
However this one, whilst I could see the moral conflict here and enjoyed the story, I think the author should have spent more time with someone from the LGBT community.
A lot of the relationships and descriptions of the women were very stereotypical. The homophobic comments from the Christian side were not triggering as that is expected, but the language used to describe a gay relationship by the author, was triggering.
For example, a loving partner would never, ever refer to their wife as a dyke. There was also an interaction between the two women which was very transphobic, then the added insult of sexual harassment just emphasises the prejudice that gay people face on the daily. (I felt this was unnecessary - unrelated to the story - and was a chapter that didn't need to be added).
Like I said, if these were made by the evangelical Christians I could have read them and moved on, but the author wants you to feel the pain and life of the two women, and I spent the whole book feeling like "this is a lesbian couple written by a straight woman who has never met or talked to a lesbian."

I was excited to read this as it's the first representation of a gay relationship, however I thought Jodi let herself down, and all it needed was some more in-depth research, other than a few Google searches about what lesbians like and don't like.
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

The less we know, the longer our explanations.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.