Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

Mizzay said we could do this so here's my Annotated bibliography on the novel Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult:

Picoult, Jodi. Handle with Care: a novel. New York, NY: Washington Square P, 2009. (477 pages)

                I enjoy Jodi Picoult books a lot. They are fiction, but they give you a lot of factual information. Every time I read one of her books, I learn about a disease, religious views, law enforcement, or criminal investigation procedures. I enjoyed Handle with Care because I learned about a disease I didn’t even know existed, called Osteogenesis Imperfecta. It is a disease where a person’s bones are very brittle and break easily and do not grow to normal size. It was also very interesting to learn about the daily life of a family with a severely disabled child. Even though it was fiction, Jodi Picoult is very good at doing research and made the fictional family just like many real families in the United States today.

                I really liked Picoult’s usage of multiple narrators. She included so many characters ranging from the mother and father to the best friend, daughter, and lawyer. Utilizing these many points of view really made the story come to life. It also created multiple protagonists. You would sympathize with one character, but then you would hear another character’s thoughts and then change your opinion. The usage of different narrators also broke the book up nicely. The plotline did not jump around too much and it was a fairly smooth read. Sometimes, you would get confused because Picoult put in multiple flashbacks spread throughout the book, but you could tell if it was a flashback most of the time depending on the certain friendships and actions each character performed. The most challenging part of the book was keeping up with the trial portion of it and keeping each character’s motive and train of thought straight. Many characters kept changing their mindset throughout the entire book, which could get a bit hard to follow at some points. But aside from that and some challenging words, it was a nice read.

                The book was not only separated into narrator chapters, but also sections. You could tell the start of a new section because it started with a recipe. This was significant because the main character was a cook. These recipes confused me because I wasn’t sure if I needed to read them or not. Sometimes the recipe would foreshadow what was to come in the upcoming section, but sometimes it wouldn’t. I didn’t find these recipes very necessary because I’m not going to bake them and they didn’t seem like an important aspect to the plotline.

                Even though there were a few setbacks to this book, I highly recommend it and any of Picoult’s other books to anyone who is intrigued by the workings of our judicial system and who wants to learn something new about a relatively unexplored subject. (474 words)