Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

Oliver would be content to live in a sailcloth tent on the coast of Argentina, watching his whales sound in warm water. I enjoy my work but certainly not the way Oliver enjoys his work. It's not such a big deal now that Rebecca is old enough to take care of herself, and since Oliver is away so much of the time, I have less to do at home. I am the only speech pathologist in this town, which means I get shuttled back and forth to different elementary schools in the San Diego suburbs. As mysteriously as it all started, the screaming went away and the next morning I married Oliver Jones - the Oliver Jones - and we just about lived happily ever after. To this day, I don't know why that happened to me. There was no foreseeable problem that I could articulate. I had a job waiting for me when I returned from my honeymoon. I was marrying the man of my dreams in a prototypical white clapboard New England church, and the reception - a lavish one with white-gloved waiters and Beluga caviar - was going to be held in my parents' backyard. I was barely nineteen, a straight-A student fresh out of Wellesley College and in 1976 that was still an accomplishment. I watched the lights come on in different houses - blue and yellow, blinking like Christmas - and wondered what was happening to me. We lived in a button-down suburb of Boston, and we were waking up the neighbors one by one. Even with my mouth closed, I continued - the high, shrill note of a nocturnal animal. My parents came into the room and put their arms around me they patted my head and smoothed my hair, fine, and I still couldn't stop screaming. why the layer of incest? It didn't enrich the story AT ALL, a brother and sister can have a remarkable bond without the odd comments.The night before I got married I woke up, screaming, from my sleep.

It was so distracting from the story, I caught myself grimacing when Jolie would talk about his love for his sister.

The creepiness from Oliver AND Joile were just awful. I liked the idea that he was navigating Jane cross-country- but his creepy love interest in his sister was sooo distracting and irrelevant to the story.

I would have nearly removed Joile as a character. If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Songs of the Humpback Whale ? The scene where Jane and Rebecca dine and dash was pretty funny, and totally believable. Would you ever listen to anything by Jodi Picoult again? I enjoy that they chose to use different narrators for different characters. I love Jodi Picoult books, and the narrators were good, some of them I've listened to before. Would you try another book from Jodi Picoult and/or the narrators?

Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult