"God is a woman."
That line hit me somewhere around hour three, while I was pretending to review my lesson plans for Monday's Gatsby unit. My red pen was uncapped, a stack of sophomore essays sat untouched, and I was completely, hopelessly lost in a custody battle between a broken mother and her cheating husband over a seven-year-old girl who might be talking to God.
Jodi Picoult doesn't ease you into this one. She drops you into the wreckage of Mariah White's marriage - a woman who already tried to kill herself after the first affair, now discovering affair number two. And just when you think this is going to be a straightforward divorce drama, her daughter Faith starts performing what can only be described as miracles. Stigmata. Healings. Conversations with an invisible friend she insists is God. A female God.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing - you show the iceberg's tip and trust the reader to feel the mass underneath. Picoult does something similar, except she's juggling about six icebergs at once: mental illness, religious hysteria, media exploitation, maternal instinct, legal maneuvering, and the terrifying question of whether any of it is real.
When the Courtroom Becomes a Cathedral
The courtroom scenes are where this audiobook really earns its nineteen hours. Picoult clearly did her homework on custody law, and the legal chess match between Mariah and Colin is genuinely riveting - not because of procedural drama, but because every witness, every motion, every sidebar is really about one question: who gets to define what's happening to this child? Is Faith mentally ill? Spiritually gifted? Being manipulated? The lawyers and experts circle each other like theologians at a debate, except the stakes are a little girl's life.
What surprised me - and I didn't expect this from a Picoult novel, honestly - was how seriously she treats the religious dimension. She doesn't play it for cheap sentiment or easy skepticism. The book sits in genuine uncertainty about Faith's experiences, and that discomfort is the engine of the whole story. My students would hate this. I love it. They want answers by page fifty. Picoult makes you wait nineteen hours and still leaves you arguing with yourself.
Two Narrators, One Problem
Let's talk about the audio production, because this is where things get complicated. Eliza Foss handles the bulk of the narration, and her voice has this steady, no-nonsense quality that works beautifully for Mariah's perspective - a woman who's been gaslit and broken and is slowly, painfully rebuilding her spine. Julia Gibson takes on the secondary narration, and the dual approach is clearly meant to represent the story's competing emotional truths.
But here's my honest problem: the minor characters blur together. I had genuine difficulty distinguishing some of the supporting cast - lawyers, media figures, family members - when Foss was handling them. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation, and Foss uses silence well in the big emotional beats, but when you've got a courtroom full of witnesses and experts, you need clearer vocal signatures to keep the listener oriented. I found myself rewinding more than I'd like to admit. (Denise caught me rewinding during our Saturday lakefront walk and gave me the look. You know the look.)
Foss has five AudioFile Earphones Awards to her name, and her core performance - Mariah's journey from shattered to fierce - is genuinely strong. But the audiobook format asks narrators to do what a printed page doesn't: differentiate without visual cues. And at nineteen hours, that's a lot of voices to keep straight when the distinctions aren't sharp enough.
The Pacing Question Nobody Wants to Discuss
Nineteen hours. That's a commitment. And I'll be straight with you: this book takes its time. Some listeners have called it slow, and I understand that reaction even though I disagree with it. The prose deserves to be savored - Picoult is building something layered here, and rushing it would collapse the tension. But there are stretches in the middle where the media circus subplot spins its wheels, and I caught my attention drifting toward the actual faculty emails I was supposed to be reading.
At 1.0x speed - which is the only civilized speed, and I will die on this hill - the pacing feels deliberate rather than sluggish. But if you're someone who listens at 1.5x or 2x, this might test your patience in ways that a tighter Picoult novel wouldn't.
Who Should Press Play (And Who Should Walk Away)
If you loved Picoult's later work - My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things - this is an earlier, rawer version of her formula. Less polished, maybe, but there's an intensity here that some of her more refined books sand down. If you're looking for the spiritual successor to something like The Poisonwood Bible in its willingness to sit with uncomfortable religious questions, this scratches that itch.
Skip this if you need crisp character differentiation in your audiobooks. And if religious themes make you impatient rather than curious, this isn't going to convert you. Honestly, the only other audiobook I've pressed pause on recently just to sit with my thoughts was Perfect Rake — completely different emotional territory, but the narrator had that same gift for landing a line and letting the silence do the rest of the work.
This is why we still read the classics - because the questions they wrestle with never get answered. Picoult isn't writing a classic here, but she's wrestling with the same ancient questions: What do we believe? Who do we trust? And when your child says she's talking to God, do you protect her from the world or protect the world from her?
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. Definitely worth pausing Gatsby lesson plans for. (Sorry, Jay. You'll keep.)
