Product Description

Things break all the time.
Day breaks, waves break, voices break.
Promises break.
Hearts break.

Every expectant parent will tell you that they don't want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they'd been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of "luckier" parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it's all worth it because Willow is, well, funny as it seems, perfect. She's smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health.

Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte should have known earlier of Willow's illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life?

Emotionally riveting and profoundly moving, Handle with Care brings us into the heart of a family bound by an incredible burden, a desperate will to keep their ties from breaking, and, ultimately, a powerful capacity for love. Written with the grace and wisdom she's become famous for, beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult offers us an unforgettable novel about the fragility of life and the lengths we will go to protect it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4343 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743296410
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Perennial bestseller Picoult (Change of Heart) delivers another engrossing family drama, spiced with her trademark blend of medicine, law and love. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe's daughter, Willow, was born with brittle bone disease, a condition that requires Charlotte to act as full-time caregiver and has strained their emotional and financial limits. Willow's teenaged half-sister, Amelia, suffers as well, overshadowed by Willow's needs and lost in her own adolescent turmoil. When Charlotte decides to sue for wrongful birth in order to obtain a settlement to ensure Willow's future, the already strained family begins to implode. Not only is the defendant Charlotte's longtime friend, but the case requires Charlotte and Sean to claim that had they known of Willow's condition, they would have terminated the pregnancy, a statement that strikes at the core of their faith and family. Picoult individualizes the alternating voices of the narrators more believably than she has previously, and weaves in subplots to underscore the themes of hope, regret, identity and family, leading up to her signature closing twists. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Perri Klass In a small New Hampshire town lives a family of four: Dad is a cop; Mom was once a professional pastry chef who now spends her time taking care of two daughters. Amelia is a somewhat troubled preteen; Willow is a 5-year-old with a rare genetic disease, osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), type III. And everything else about this family and everything about this novel spins back to that genetic mutation: Willow's bones don't form properly. By the time she was born, she had seven broken bones, which had been seen on ultrasound; four more got broken during the delivery; and by now, five years later, her whole family speaks the language of Willow's vulnerable bones. Everyone knows the sound and the look of another one breaking. This is why Amelia feels left out and angry and self-hating by turns, and this is why the mother's days are a constant challenge of caretaking and advocacy and worry. And this is what's so good about Jodi Picoult's "Handle With Care." When I was doing my residency in pediatrics (at the same children's hospital where Willow goes for her experimental therapy, which may strengthen her bones but may also have bad side effects years down the line), I was awed by the parents of children with chronic diseases like OI. They seemed to me a fascinating, heroic and almost completely invisible part of the population, recognizing one another, telling their astounding stories, "going to medical school the hard way," as we sometimes called it. Why were there not novels and movies and ballads to celebrate their love and their determination and their very particular side of the story? Well, here's such a novel. It's well written, it's conscientiously researched and, most important, it presents a character who is a child instead of a disability personified. With her strong personality and weak bones, Willow is a 5-year-old who knows too much. She's jealous of what other children can do. The action of "Handle With Care" begins when Willow's mother, Charlotte, decides to bring a suit against her own best friend, the obstetrician who took care of her during the pregnancy. It's a "wrongful life" suit, arguing that if the diagnosis of osteogenesis imperfecta had been made at the first prenatal ultrasound, she would have been able to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy at 18 weeks. Instead, the suit argues, the obstetrician missed certain subtle signs, and that diagnosis wasn't made till the 27-week ultrasound revealed those seven broken bones. By that time, Charlotte and her husband were unwilling to consider a late-term abortion. Everyone around Charlotte is opposed to this lawsuit. Her husband won't have any part of it. Her older daughter is destroyed by it, inside and out, and loses her best friend, the obstetrician's daughter. Willow herself is devastated, correctly understanding that her mother is claiming that it would have been better if she had never been born. The organized osteogenesis imperfecta community is furious. When Charlotte takes her daughter to an OI convention, Willow is overjoyed to be in a group where she's normal, but finds that her mother is a pariah. Even Charlotte's lawyer, a young woman on a quest to locate her birth mother, doesn't like the smell of this wrongful-birth suit. With the deck stacked against Charlotte, it's sometimes hard to feel much sympathy for her. And yet, this mother is caught between the genuine love she feels for her child, to whom she has devoted herself completely, and the anger she feels at what has happened to her life: "What if it was someone's fault?" she thinks. "How could I admit to anyone -- much less myself -- that you were not only the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me . . . but also the most exhausting, the most overwhelming?" Yes, the money she hopes to win could buy her daughter the best wheelchairs, the best summer camps, but for the sake of wringing that money out of the system, she destroys her closest friend, alienates her older daughter, horrifies her husband and damages the child she's trying to help. You don't have to be a physician, with a somewhat jaundiced view of the personal-injury tort system, to wish Charlotte could see what every other character can see -- that she is creating a new and terrible tragedy. Charlotte's motivation for the lawsuit, which will endanger if not ruin everything she loves, is that she needs money to take proper care of her daughter. I couldn't help remembering my old days at the hospital and the families who would make their way down from New Hampshire, a state notoriously limited in the services it provided to children with disabilities. Those parents all made the same dark joke, quoting the Revolutionary War slogan on their license plates: "Live free or die." "Handle With Care" is a great read, with strong characters, an exciting lawsuit to pull you along and really good use of the medical context. Picoult does a terrific job of evoking OI and its peculiarities -- from the likelihood that parents might be accused of child abuse (because of fractures that don't quite "make sense") to the incessant push and pull of wanting a child to experience kindergarten friendships, Disney World and ice skating, while worrying constantly that another fragile bone will break.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Sure, Jodi Picoult can be formulaic, but few critics seemed to mind her well-researched, domestic-and-legal-drama-told-through-multiple-viewpoints framework for Handle With Care. Except for the Boston Globe, which noted that "the construct feels a little tired and trepid, creating more distance than illumination," reviewers embraced Picoult's latest offering. Told primarily through the voices of Willow's mother, her father, her adolescent sister, the obstetrician, and a lawyer, the novel wrenched readers' hearts as it examines motherhood, family, and disability. The bonus? Charlotte, a renowned pastry chef, adds a little sweetness to the family tragedy by interspersing her dessert recipes throughout the novel.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Customer Reviews

This is the last Jodi Picoult book I will read
I've read ALL of Jodi Picoult's books. Some of my favorites are Perfect Match, My Sister's Keeper, and The Pact. Compared to those books, her latest release, Handle with Care, is contrived, sloppy, boring, and disappointing. Oh, and too many points of view included. I almost laughed at the ending because I honestly didn't think the book could have ended with more of a cop-out.

It doesn't seem like the publishers bothered copyediting or proofreading this book. Kitty Litter should not be capitalized. I don't care how "mature" a 6 year old is, she would create a Gmail account. And, Jodi, please spare me the gratuitous references to Facebook. These are just a few things I can think of off the top of my head -- there were many more.

Perhaps releasing one book a year is too much for Jodi Picoult, because the product is suffering. Her stories used to be contemporary, heart-wrenching and full of plot twists.

Handle with Care is simply a regurgitation of lawyers, sisters with issues, second marriages, etc. With some bulimia and cutting thrown in and not really addressed. Not to mention the recipes. What was the point of those? Charlotte's career as a pastry chef seems conveniently trendy and never becomes anything more than that, except for the lame recipes scattered throughout the book. It's like Jodi's editors and marketing team sat around a table and came up with every single thing they could incorporate into this book and then threw each thing in, none of which were successful.

I'm glad I got this from the library instead of purchasing it. What a disappointment. Don't bother.

Give me a break...a very bad Picoult read.
I have enjoyed Jodi Picoult's books since the very early days in the 90s, and I have to say that although they were getting better and better, she definitely plateaued around Nineteen Minutes and has now begun the downward spiral. I should add that I am also a high school English teacher, so I deal with a fair amount of books in my spare time. This book was written so similarly to My Sister's Keeper that I had a pretty good feeling on what the ending was going to be near the beginning of the book, and I was right.

Warning: mild spoiler to follow.

Like her book last year, Change of Heart, this book just seems to follow a formula she's gotten too comfortable with in her last few novels: a child with a medical issue, parents with personal issues, and an angsty lawyer with a long backstory.

Probably the worst part of this book and Picoult's recent novels is her tendency to dive into these awful comparisons. She describes characters with breath that smells of coffee and regret, and cookies that are baked with a special ingredient: the ingredient of remorse. The characters are constantly looking at or holding on to something physical, then realizing what they are really looking at/holding is a feeling: sympathy, love, grief, etc. Give me a break. I could handle these once every few chapters, but there is literally one of these every few pages. Is someone ghostwriting this stuff in?

As a mother, I found the character of Charlotte to be completely unbelievable. Throughout the novel, she recognizes the fact that filing a wrongful birth lawsuit may destroy her daughter's image of her and of herself, but all she cares about is money, even when they never previously struggled with money.

Additionally, for kicks, there is a teenage sister who is thrown in, and of course she has her teenage problems. But she has not just a few problems, but all problems: bulimia, self-mutilation, depression, blue hair. And she develops them all at once. And no one cares, and they're never really resolved.

The whole book was just very disappointing. I think Picoult needs to up her game if she plans to keep her readers. Ditch the angsty lawyer and the horrible comparisons on the feelings. And if you're a reader, take it out of the library and be thankful you can be done with it for good in three weeks. I barely made it through.

Doesn't make sense
My main problem with this book was with the wrongful birth topic. Charlotte DID find out her daughter had OI while pregnant. She COULD have had an abortion then. The story would have made more sense if there was not another ultra sound after the one at 18 weeks and they wouldn't have known until birth that the baby had OI. Marin's argument and the jury's decision seemed as if Piper caused the baby's disability. It seems unlikely to me that any jury would award damages to this couple in this situation. The whole premise seems unrealistic.