Jodi Picoult's 'Handle with Care': siamese twin of 'My Sister's Keeper'

March 31, 7:00 PMBook ExaminerMichelle Kerns

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Jodi Picoult's latest book, Handle with Care, is suspiciously similar to her 2004 bestseller, My Sister's Keeper: both involve girls with serious diseases, families teetering on the edge of breakdown, sisters torn between loyalty and a desire to be free of the incessant demands of illness, and emotional courtroom drama scenes. It's tough to believe that this pair of tear-jerkers weren't surgically separated at birth.

The surprise in reading Handle With Care isn't in being taken aback by a brand new Picoult direction -- no, she's trodden this terrain a million times before. It is in realizing with astonishment, that despite the been-there-done-that, she's managed to put out a book that really, isn't too bad.

(This, by the way, is the maiden voyage of the Book Examiner Book Review format explained and defended in yawning detail here. If you love it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll keep your innocence intact and let the subject die a natural death.)

Title: Handle With Care

Author: Jodi Picoult

The genre this book fits most comfortably within:

Modern fiction, particularly in that Circle of Hell reserved for Family Dramas

The Plot:

Willow O'Keefe is a six-year old girl who is brilliant, funny, and has a wicked memory for trivia ("The average woman consumes six pounds of lipstick in her lifetime;" "There's more than one hundred chemicals in a cup of coffee."). She also has osteogenesis imperfecta, a disorder that makes her bones fragile enough to break at the slightest fall, bump, or twist. Her mother, father, and sharp-tongued but protective older sister live constantly under the financial and emotional burden of the disease. It's no picnic, but they manage.

When the snake enters their garden of family harmony, it is in the unlikely form of a lawsuit -- a wrongful birth lawsuit that Willow's mother, Charlotte, is convinced will give them enough money to pay for all of the medical bills and special equipment Willow will need as she grows. There are only three problems with this plan: 1. The obstetrician targeted by the lawsuit is Charlotte's best friend, Piper, 2. Charlotte's husband, Sean, refuses to go along with the lawsuit, and 3. Willow begins to wonder if her mother really thinks her birth was a mistake -- and so does Charlotte.

How is Ms. Picoult's writing?:

Ms. Picoult writes in Handle with Care as she has in each of her other books -- with a sort of ponderously heavy emotionalism.  Although the story is told from the perspectives of Charlotte, Sean, Piper, Willow's sister Amelia, and Marin, the lawyer handling Charlotte's wrongful birth suit, they all speak in an identical weighty, hyper-philosophical tone like Obi Wan Kanobi philosophizing about the force. Amelia has got a few nods to her age in there -- "like," "totally" -- but, other than that, there is little to differentiate one voice from another.

What feel does Handle with Care have?

Heavy. Not the sort of tome to read at the beach.

               Ms. Picoult

What worked magnificently:

You'd think that Ms. Picoult would have nothing left to say about young children suffering and family relationships in crisis. However, she does. Although the writing in Handle with Care is nothing special, the power and truth of the emotions Ms. Picoult writes about manage to carry the book without being much helped or hindered by the writing. She is a woman who clearly knows what she's talking about. Now, imagine if her writing style was honed to assist as opposed to lying motionless while the book's ideas do all the work.... That would be a book to get excited over.

What failed miserably:

Ms. Picoult is one of those authors whose reputation is built on her specialization in a super-specific niche -- in her case, young children and families caught up in medical and ethical dilemmas. Authors who restrict themselves to writing variations on only a handful of topics, however, run the risk of becoming caricatures of themselves as the books stack up and begin to look like clones of one another.

Take Amy Tan for instance. Ms. Tan's The Joy Luck Club captured the relationship between Asian mothers and daughters in a way that nothing else ever quite had managed before. Ms. Tan's next several books -- The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter -- were o.k., but they only succeeded in reading like variations on the Joy Luck Club theme. With each successive clone, the author's stock decreased exponentially. Not good.

The only way an author focusing their attention on a microscopically narrow theme can hope to stay breathtakingly interesting is to find some other way to plumb the depths of the subject -- such as upping the ante with the writing style. Make the characters sound different, approach the topic in a whole new way, make this book sound totally different from that book, even if they are both talking about the same thing. Ms. Picoult fails to do this in Handle with Care. She does throw in a substantial amount of breakage and healing symbolism, but both are impotent when it comes to giving the book power.

Oh, and the book's ending? Rubbish. Perhaps Ms. Picoult is too used to having "Gotcha!" endings on her novels. She should have recognized that this particular ending fits about as well as I do in a red leather mini-skirt.

How does Handle with Care compare to other Modern Fiction Family Dramas?

Quite well. If a tear-jerker family-in-crisis book is what you're looking for, this fits the bill admirably.

How does it compare to Ms. Picoult's other books?

You mean other than having been separated at birth from its siamese twin, My Sister's Keeper? I predict, with 100% certainty that Handle with Care will be described somewhere in the United States as "classic Picoult." In reviewerspeak, that means "I'm not sure which of her books I was reading, they're all so much alike."

 

If you like Handle with Care, give these tomes a whirl:

Other than reading Ms. Picoult's other novels, especially My Sister's Keeper, take a look at Diane Chamberlain's Before the Storm. It is told by a series of voices and relates the circumstances of a family's disintegration and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Its tone is identical to most of Ms. Picoult's books, complete even with a surprise ending.

If it's the shared narration technique of the book you like, try Anita Shreve's Testimony, though be warned, Testimony deals with much rawer content than any of Ms. Picoult's works. Ms. Shreve does an excellent job giving each of the dozen or more characters an entirely separate voice.

Thomas H. Cook has written a number of family-in-crisis books that incorporate very surprising endings. The Cloud of Unknowing and Red Leaves are excellent. Neither are sensationalist or graphic and both delve into complicated family relationships.

If you hate Handle with Care, cast your reading gaze here:

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a prime example of a serious and emotional family drama that combines exquisite writing with a great plot. Ms. Sebold's style is as different from Ms. Picoult's as chalk  is from cheese -- and, in my opinion, Ms. Sebold's is much superior.

Sometimes, you want to read a family drama that doesn't leave you feeling hollow and completely depressed. If that's the case, it's time to read Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The story, told in the first person by Ruby Lenox, chronicles the life, times, and tragedies of the Lenox family with the kind of humor that rarely shows its face in family dramas. This book was Ms. Atkinson's first novel (I hate you Ms. Atkinson) and resides at a respectable #7 on my personal list of favorite books of all-time. 

What to drink while reading Handle with Care:

Charlotte O'Keefe, Willow's mother, was a famous pastry chef before Willow's birth, and recipes for things like Chocolate Raspberry Souffle and Blueberry Buckle head the chapter sections. According to He Said Beer, She Said Wine: Impassioned food pairings to debate and enjoy -- from burgers to Brie and beyond, lucious baked goods of this type are best served with either a red Port, a Sauterne, a Muscat, or, if you're a beer aficionado, a fruity American beer. My pick would be their suggestion for an "intensely sweet" dessert: the La Granja Espresso Stout from Denmark's Norrebro Bryghus. You've got to have something strong to counteract all that sugar.