When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin

Oh man. This book was my book club pick for August, and I was a little skeptical about it. It's always a little suspicious when a book club pick is something I've never heard of or that doesn't sound familiar at all. The reason I'd never heard of this book is because it falls solidly in the "inspirational fiction" section of the library, which I basically never read in (although I definitely read my share of Mormon inspirational fiction as a teenager, based on whatever was at my house, haha). It's about a young girl who needs a heart transplant, and a man who could be her doctor although he's battling his demons of failing his wife who needed her own heart transplant. The subtitle of the book is "A Novel of the Heart," which is a nice double entendre, because he talks a lot about the physiological information about the heart and the emotional aspect of our hearts. I didn't hate reading this, and I got somewhat interested in what was going on in the story, but I got seriously bogged down by so many inconsistencies and strange things in this story. Here are some questions/problems I had:

-The girl had her parents die, her twin sister die, serious heart problems and needs a heart transplant, then she got hit by a truck, got mold in their house, and then a tornado smashed the house where they were staying. Seriously?
-The doctor, our narrator, talked about his childhood as background in alternating chapters at the beginning. He met his wife when he was like 6, and fell in love with her from day one. When he found out she had a heart problem, he decided at the age of 7 that he would become a heart doctor and fix Emma's heart. So he therefore spent all of his free time reading books about hearts and medical texts, from the age of 7 until he graduated from medical school. Again, seriously? What seven-year-old would ever do that or be capable of it?
-The book was set in rural Georgia and is a super-Christian book. Therefore, everyone is constantly praying to God. This is nice, but I've never been somewhere where people pray like this. Like, they say a super-long prayer at a restaurant and the manager of the restaurant comes and kneels behind their table to join in. Or the girl is about to go into surgery and her doctor kneels down and they pray together before putting her under anesthesia. It seems way over-the-top.
-The narrator stopped practicing medicine when his wife died and he basically ran away from everything. That was five years ago and since then he hasn't practiced medicine at all. Then this girl shows up and after wrestling with the decision for a long time, he finally tells her that he's the world's best heart transplant surgeon (of course) and she asks him to be her doctor. So he just goes into the hospital and does it. Aren't there issues about his license or medical insurance? That's not allowed for someone to just show up out of the blue and work as a doctor out of nowhere. It's not like doing CPR on someone until the paramedics show up. Come onnnnn.

All in all, I was too distracted by all of these plotlines that were totally unbelievable to get much out of the story. I wanted to read this book because I like book club and I haven't been able to go as often the last few months. But man, this was kind of a painful read.