Christmas Surprises

When we think about Christmas, some of us think of Santa Claus. While others think of presents waiting under Christmas trees.

So what is it about Christmas that makes Japanese marketers think I'm desperate for buy-a-dick services and gay/orgy/other sorts of crazy sex parties? Humor me.

Book Review: Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult's best-selling My Sister's Keeper had both my mother and I crying like children until our eyes were red and swollen for two days. It was so moving and poetic, so original, and at the same time so heartbreaking that we had to make the difficult decision to jump right to the end and stop sobbing over all the miniscule details in between. It was a beautiful book.

Which is precisely why I did not hesitate to pick up a copy of Ms. Picoult's newest fictional novel, Handle with Care.

The subject matter and the characters are eerily similar to the plot & characters of My Sister's Keeper - a beautiful child is diagnosed with a life-threatening, incurable, debilitating disorder. In this case, it's osteogenesis imperfecta, a severe form of brittle bone disease. An obsessively protecting, fiercely loving mother. An overlooked, angsty sister. A compassionate lawyer with a conscience. A hearing and a trial. An ending that's supposed to come as a surprise.

Had Ms. Picoult ran out of brilliant ideas? Just because the disabled child plus controversial court case formula proved to be a success in My Sister's Keeper, doesn't mean she could pull the entire cast and situation out of a best-seller, give them new names and a new disease, then call it a new book.

But that's not even why this book was such a disappointment. Although the mother was doing what she felt to be right for all the wrong reasons in My Sister's Keeper, she didn't appear to be spiteful to the readers. She still retained vestiges of human conscience and even though I didn't agree with what she did, I knew she did it out of love. But Charlotte, the pastry chef cum mother of Willow the disabled six year old, was so manipulative, irresponsible, and such a bitch in all her theory of "the ends should justify the means," that, at times, I simply felt like hitting her.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that when the tragedy happened at the end, I felt a sort of savage joy. It was inappropriate and Ms. Picoult probably expected her readers to lament and to cry the same way they did for the poor family in MSK, but Charlotte totally deserved what she got.

I definitely had more respect for Ms. Picoult as a writer before this book happened.

(Image taken from http://www.popular.com.sg/)