Handle with Care

Handle with Care is the seventeenth novel by the American writer Jodi Picoult, published in 2009 and a number one New York Times bestseller.

Willow O'Keefe is born with Type III osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that means she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows and will live with pain for the rest of her life. Her family loves her and does everything they can, and the medical expenses of caring for her steadily outpace what they can earn. Her mother Charlotte reaches a decision that will end the family as it is: she files a wrongful birth suit against her obstetrician, the friend who delivered Willow, on the grounds that the practice failed to diagnose her condition early enough to offer a choice. To win the compensation that would fund a lifetime of care, Charlotte has to testify that she would have ended the pregnancy, in a courtroom where her daughter can hear her. The novel follows the consequences for every member of the family.

Picoult's novels take a moral dilemma and give each person caught in it a voice, and this one is built on the distance between loving a child and the choices made before she was born.