{"id":3790,"date":"2010-08-09T21:55:17","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T03:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/?p=3790"},"modified":"2010-08-09T21:55:17","modified_gmt":"2010-08-10T03:55:17","slug":"good-reads-handle-with-care-by-jodi-picoult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/09\/good-reads-handle-with-care-by-jodi-picoult\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Reads: Handle With Care, by Jodi Picoult"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since my last book review<\/a>, hasn’t it?\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/a>, by Jodi Picoult.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve seen Jodi Picoult’s books mentioned everywhere for a couple of years now, but this is the first I’ve read.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Handle With Care<\/a> is about one family’s life with a special needs child.\u00c2\u00a0 Charlotte and her husband Sean have an extremely intelligent,\u00c2\u00a0 5 year old daughter named Willow who was born with OI-osteogenesis imperfecta, meaning that her bones break very easily.\u00c2\u00a0 She can break ribs by coughing, she broke her leg after slipping on a napkin.\u00c2\u00a0 By the time she is 6 she has had close to 60 breaks, 7 of which happened in-utero.\u00c2\u00a0 Willow experiences a particularly bad break while on vacation at Disney.<\/p>\n

In the fallout from that incident, including a child abuse investigation, issues surrounding Willow’s birth and when she was diagnosed with OI arise.\u00c2\u00a0 Charlotte had several ultrasounds during her pregnancy, including one at 18 weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 Why wasn’t Willow’s OI noticed until 27 weeks?\u00c2\u00a0 The attorney they meet with suggests that perhaps a case could be made for a wrongful birth lawsuit.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What if Willow had been diagnosed earlier?\u00c2\u00a0 What if Willow had never been born?\u00c2\u00a0 What constitutes a valuable life?\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I found this story completely fascinating.\u00c2\u00a0 The amount of care and the emotional energy needed to care for Willow were eye opening.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Have you read any Jodi Picoult novels?\u00c2\u00a0 Which one is your favorite?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since my last book review, hasn’t it?\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Fiction is a little easier for me to write about than non-fiction, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3790"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3806,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3790\/revisions\/3806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepickyapple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}