Handle With Care

Breakage and fragility are recurring and apt motifs in a novel entitled Handle with Care, representing the fragility of life through broken bones, broken relationships, and in the novel’s climactic moment, broken ice. In a literal sense, the threat of Willow breaking bones dominates the O’Keefes’ lives as they strive to protect her from pain and danger while providing her with the opportunity to experience the world. The weight of this responsibility leads to the lawsuit that fractures both Charlotte’s relationship with her best friend and her marriage to Sean, as well as her relationship with her older daughter Amelia. Marin, too, experiences the permanent cleaving of her hoped-for relationship with her biological mother. Picoult thus highlights the fragility of connections between people.

This motif of fragility arises, too, in the dessert recipes throughout the book. From spun sugar to soufflé to meringue to caramel, desserts and candy-making require care and attention to reach the desired consistency—a misstep can lead to cracking, falling, crumbling, or otherwise failing. In this way, Picoult creates a parallel between crafting delicate desserts and maintaining interpersonal relationships.

Willow’s love of trivia symbolizes her ability to act differently than people expect her to because of her visible disability, ultimately highlighting the theme of Visible and Invisible Illnesses and Disabilities. While she is the size of a toddler and people often expect her to act as such, she is a precocious almost-6-year-old who loves Jeopardy! and can read well beyond her grade level. Of Willow, Amelia says, “It freaked people out, to come across a five-year old who knew that toilets flush in the key of E-flat or that the oldest word in the English language is town” (19). At the same time, her disability facilitates her consumption of facts and knowledge, as she is frequently immobile while recovering and relies on books, The History Channel, and the internet to entertain herself. By having such a wide range of knowledge, Willow can live a full and adventurous life. Additionally, Willow uses pieces of trivia to connect with people, whether that be doctors, other children, or her family members. It is her wide-ranging knowledge that makes her so likable and relatable. Throughout the novel, Willow’s trivia humanizes her; she is not just an abstract idea, as the wrongful birth lawsuit implies, but a dynamic human.