Book Review: Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

I read Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult while I was on vacation last week. I’m going to be honest: I am not a fan. I hate saying that since another of Picoult’s books remains my favorite. While I found Handle With Care to be intriguing, the book pushed too many buttons for my liking. The ending, in true Picoult fashion, left me pretty peeved as well.

The premise of the book is that a mother gives birth to a child with osteogenesis imperfecta, otherwise known as Brittle Bone Disease. Through a series of events during the child’s fifth year of life, the family ends up suing the mother’s original OBGYN for what is known as “wrongful birth.” The book follows the lawsuit, the problems that arise within the family and the outcome only to eventually make it all null and void. That’s all I’m saying on the topic of the ending.

So, what does this have to do with adoption? Why am I writing my review here?

The paralegal assigned to the case is an adoptee seeking her biological mother. I know. I don’t know how I keep happening upon books of this nature but, really, I’d like to open one book, just one, and not have the word adoption written anywhere within the two covers. Back to the book at hand, the paralegal obviously has some issues with the mother who is claiming that she never would have given birth to her daughter had she known about her disease. Yes, that’s what wrongful birth lawsuits claim.

The definition is this:

Wrongful birth is a legal cause of action in some common law countries in which the parents of a congenitally diseased child claim that their doctor failed to properly warn of their risk of conceiving or giving birth to a child with serious genetic or congenital abnormalities.[1] Thus, the plaintiffs claim, the defendant prevented them from making a truly informed decision as to whether or not to have the child. Wrongful birth is a type of medical malpractice tort.

Obviously, an adoptee is going to take issue with a lawsuit of this nature. Throughout the book, we follow her inner turmoil in representing this case while simultaneously trying to seek out the woman who chose to give her life and give her another home. In one chapter, she summed up that turmoil quite well as she worked on the letter she was writing to her biological mother.

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn’t have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who’d let us go. We lived in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we’d become accustomed to.

And that’s really what the book boils down to: families are never what you want them to be. Really, while I didn’t like this book, I liked the issues that were discussed. Everything from adoption to abortion to quality of life to bulimia to parenting to marriage issues was thrown out on the table. While someone mentioned that adoption issues were discussed in the book, I just assumed that it was in relation to the wrongful birth suit and not a whole other sub-plot of the novel itself. It caught me off guard and, perhaps, put a bad taste in my mouth.

But the ending? Typical, when assessing who the author is, and totally inappropriate for this particular book. What may have worked in another book doesn’t always work in another and this a prime example.

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