Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Handle with Care, by Jodi Picoult

The Story: During an ultrasound at 27 weeks, Charlotte and her husband Sean are told that their baby has a disease that makes her bones very, very brittle.  She already has seven broken bones and if she doesn’t die at birth will have many more.  They are heartbroken, but push on.  Willow is born.  More bones are broken, but she lives.

The story in the book takes place when Willow is five years old.  She has had sixy-something broken bones. She is smart and capable and adorable.  She falls and breaks both of her femurs on vacation and Charlotte and Sean are arrested on suspicion of child abuse.  When everything clears up, Sean decides to file a lawsuit because of all that they went through.  While the lawyer tells them that they don’t really have a case in this incident, but that they could possibly file a “wrongful birth” lawsuit saying that their doctor didn’t catch Willow’s disease early enough to allow for them to terminate their pregnancy.  All they have to do is say that they would have terminated, given the information earlier.

The decisions that are made based on this little tidbit and all of the fallout make up the rest of this story.

What I Thought: If I am judging this book based only on its own merits, I really liked it.  Like I’ve told you before, most of my favorite books are the “throw the family into a situation and watch them wiggle out” type of books.  This is exactly that.

The book switched points of view every chapter.  And not just between two or three characters.  I lost count.  It was literally every main character in the book, except for the MAIN main character, Willow.  This was kind of effective because it let you get into everyone else’s head, but it wasn’t really carried out effectively.  The voices all sounded very similar with the exception of the teenage sister, which sounded the same- only with the addition of far to many “like”s.

The moral dilemma here is what made the book worth reading.  At the beginning of the book, I found myself flip flopping back and forth- able to see the benefits of each side. After I made up my mind, however, I wanted to scream at the characters that were on the other side of the issue.  It was emotionally provocative, without a doubt.

But let me get right down to it.  I cannot judge this book based only on its own merit.  I read a book by Jodi Piccoult when I was in high school and I was wild about it. I mean, I fell in love. I read it probably a dozen times.  Then I read several of her other books. Not back to back, mind you, just when I came across them at the library or the used book store. They are all the same.  She just has this little outline that she uses.  She has to even have a hat full of characters that she pulls from to, just subbing out different names.

In case you’ve read any Jodi Picoult, just know that this one is My Sister’s Keeper plus The Pact, with the changing narrators, like in Nineteen Minutes.

I guess if you have people buying your books you can do whatever you want… and to be fair, I keep trying again. But I just wish that she would try something new.  I love how she writes characters and I love the moral issues she explores, but I knew from the first few pages how this was going to turn out, and I was right on the money.  That’s annoying to me.

Conclusion: If you haven’t read Jodi Picoult before, this probably isn’t the best, but it would be a good introduction into how she does it.