Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

My Rating: 4.5 stars Published: 2009 Pages: 477 "Things break all the time. Glass, and dishes, and fingernails... You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break... Promises break. Hearts break." This story broke my heart, it touched me, made me angry, made me cry & made me think. We follow the O'Keefe family, and gain rare insight into a family's daily struggle to cope with life with a child with a serious medical condition. The story is narrated alternatively by parents Charlotte & Sean, daughter Amelia & Charlotte's best friend & obstetrician Piper Reece & each chapter is addressed to Willow, a child born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. This is a condition with devastating effects, hundreds of broken bones over a lifetime & an immeasurable physical, emotional & financial toll on a family. After a terrible series of events, Charlotte files a wrongful birth lawsuit against her obstetrician in the hope that a settlement will provide Willow with a better life. The decision tears a family apart, a marriage disintegrates, a friendship is destroyed and Amelia becomes yet another casualty; a child overlooked. I admired Charlotte for her resilience, her strength & determination, her willingness to risk all, in the fight to give one child a better life but these were also the reasons I hated her. I hated her preoccupation with protecting Willow at the expense of her eldest daughter, her inability to see Amelia spiralling out of control broke my heart. And most of all I hated the fact that the one Charlotte was trying to protect was the one left with a 'hurt' far beyond the pain of broken bones. I cried reading 6 year old Willow's words - "I'm not the kind of kid anyone wants." "Nobody keeps things that get broken. Sooner or later, they get thrown away." There were a few negatives in this story for me, issues that warrant a mention - On a whole this story resonated with truth & sincerity; having children with a bleeding disorder requiring frequent hospitalisation, some of the circumstances described in this story were from the pages of our own family book. In saying that, the events surrounding Willow's hospitalisation in Florida were ridiculously far-fetched. The subplot involving Charlotte's lawyer wasn't particularly believable. And lastly ... I loathed the ending; it seemed contrived & insincere. It defied belief. I kept turning the pages hoping to find the real ending. A small detraction in the overall emotional investment, but there nonetheless. An emotionally riveting and profoundly moving story. Picoult brings us another impressively researched novel, exploring relationships, the price a mother is willing to pay to protect her child & the fragility of life.