Jodi Picoult's latest tearjerker, Handle With Care, lives up to the Picoult tearjerker theme in every way. She includes the usual personal ethics and morality theme with medical aspects. This time, she chose the subject of osteogenesis imperfecta. In laymen terms, it's brittle bone syndrome, which means that people who suffer from this disease can do very little and break tons of bones.
Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta. By the time we meet her in the novel, she is 5 years old and has already broken some many bones that her mother, Charlotte, has lost track of the exact number, although always recalling where and the pain she felt with each break. Charlotte and her husband Sean are beginning to see how having a child with such a complicated disability affects them financially and as a family. When Sean seeks an attorney after another incident at Disney World involving Willow and multiple breaks, their relationship begins to break apart along with their family. The attorney offers Charlotte a way to get out of her family's bleak financial future by claiming a wrongful birth suit against her ob/gyn, who also happens to be her best friend. Finally, to add misery to even more misery, Charlotte's older daughter, Amelia, begins to have her own problems dealing with bulimia caused by her own self hatred.
When I can't decide what I want to read, I check out a Jodi Picoult book. I can guarantee a few things when I finish one of her books: 1) I will feel much better about my life and whatever negative situations I am dealing with and 2) I will cry and thus, probably just feel better in general. I also know that I will read an "impossible to put down" book and that I will thoroughly enjoy it, even though I will probably be morally against the end decision. She often deals with children, rare diseases and crazy law suits that have to do with those children. Parents often make absurb decisions in Picoult's book but when I think about it and whether I would make that same decision, I sometimes stall. Would I be able to do the same thing?
I am always intrigued by Ms. Picoult's novels. She pulls together a number of provocative issues and makes one question our own morality. I will say that this particular novel of hers did not make me cry. I thoroughly enjoyed the book until the end. I felt it was contrived and Ms. Picoult just wanted the reader to react to her rash decision without any thought to how well we paid attention to the novel. Willow is so much smarter than Ms. Picoult makes her out to be in the end, she would never have acted the way she did after all she had been through. I also felt the same about Charlotte's character. Would a mother who claimed that she loved her daughter that much do what she did and believe that her daughter would truly recover emotionally?
So, if you want a tearjerker, read a Jodi Picoult novel. Just don't read this one...read The Pact or even better, the original and more believable tearjerker, My Sister's Keeper.
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