Good Reads: Handle With Care, by Jodi Picoult

It’s been a while since my last book review, hasn’t it?  I’ve got at least 5 books queued up for review, but as much as I love to read, I find writing book reviews to be the hardest posts of all to write.  Fiction is a little easier for me to write about than non-fiction, so let’s start with a book I just finished last night: Handle With Care, by Jodi Picoult.  I’ve seen Jodi Picoult’s books mentioned everywhere for a couple of years now, but this is the first I’ve read.

Handle With Care is about one family’s life with a special needs child.  Charlotte and her husband Sean have an extremely intelligent,  5 year old daughter named Willow who was born with OI-osteogenesis imperfecta, meaning that her bones break very easily.  She can break ribs by coughing, she broke her leg after slipping on a napkin.  By the time she is 6 she has had close to 60 breaks, 7 of which happened in-utero.  Willow experiences a particularly bad break while on vacation at Disney.

In the fallout from that incident, including a child abuse investigation, issues surrounding Willow’s birth and when she was diagnosed with OI arise.  Charlotte had several ultrasounds during her pregnancy, including one at 18 weeks.  Why wasn’t Willow’s OI noticed until 27 weeks?  The attorney they meet with suggests that perhaps a case could be made for a wrongful birth lawsuit.  To succeed, Charlotte and Sean would have to claim that Charlotte’s ob-gyn–who is also Charlotte’s best friend–was negligent in not noticing the OI abnormalities sooner, and that if they been aware of Willow’s condition earlier, they would have terminated the pregnancy.

What if Willow had been diagnosed earlier?  What if Willow had never been born?  What constitutes a valuable life?  The answers to these questions fracture Charlotte and Sean’s marriage, destroy Charlotte’s friendship with Piper, and cause strained relationships not only with Willow, but with their older daughter Amelia.

I found this story completely fascinating.  The amount of care and the emotional energy needed to care for Willow were eye opening.  This book raises some polarizing topics (abortion, issues surrounding disabilities), but no matter what side you fall on, I guarantee you won’t be able to put this compelling book down.  Without spoiling the plot, I will say that I didn’t like the ending, but this is still a fantastic book, and I certainly plan to check out more books by this author.

Have you read any Jodi Picoult novels?  Which one is your favorite?

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