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 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 broke 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.
Jodi Picoult’s “Handle With Care” is well written, conscientiously researched and, most important, it presents a character who is a child instead of a disability personified.
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.
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. 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.
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.
Perri Klass is a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, and the author of “The Mercy Rule.”
Fiction
Handle With Care, by Jodi Picoult, $27.95
