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Book Review – Handle with Care

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Contemporary Realistic Fiction

“If you chose to stop a loved one’s suffering—either before it began or during the process—was that murder, or mercy?”

“I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn’t you.”

“You were Willow, pure and simple. There was nobody else like you. I knew it the moment I first held you, wrapped in foam so that you wouldn’t get hurt in my arms: your soul was stronger than your body, and in spite of what the doctors told me over and over, I always believed that was the reason for the breaks. What ordinary skeleton could contain a heart as big as the whole world?”

Six year old Willow was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which is a brittle bones disease. She will have several hundred broken bones in her, most likely, short life, among an array of other disabilities that will cause pain and constant struggle. Her parents, Charlotte and Sean love her just the way she is, she is perfect. After a nightmarish trip to Disney World, they visit a lawyer who advises them they have a case for a lawsuit, just not the kind they were thinking, a wrongful birth suit.

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Book 29: New Hampshire

Blurb:
When Willow is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, her parents are devastated–she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. 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, 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 had 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?

Book 10: Georgia

True Crime –

“Follow Ann Rule inside the twisting case of Bart Corbin, the Atlanta dentist and “handsome twin” tied to two murders nearly two decades apart. With a successful practice and an upscale suburban home, Bart Corbin appeared to share an idyllic life with his pretty wife, Jennifer, and their two young sons. But there were secrets – including an affair of Bart’s that drove Jenn to look for love in the internet – that would prove deadly on the December morning Jenn was found with with a single gunshot wound to her head. Police suspected suicide, but a relentless county investigator dug deeper to find a shattering revelation from Bart Corbin’s past: a former girlfriend whose death from a gunshot wound was also ruled a suicide…. The chilling discovery would soon ensnare the remorseless killer behind both tragic deaths: Bart Corbin.”