With Care By Jodi Picoult

With Care By Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult has been writing domestic suspense novels for over two decades, and With Care is no different. The premise is straightforward. A woman finds out her deceased husband left behind another family. She has to decide whether to confront them or walk away. That is basically the entire plot in one sentence. The protagonist is named Mandy. She married a man who presented himself as devoted and faithful, and after his death, she uncovers letters or records that prove he maintained a secret second life. Picoult splits the narrative between Mandy's perspective and the other woman's perspective, which is the author's standard technique. It works here, though it does not break any new ground. What people seem to like about this one is how Picoult handles the moral ambiguity. Neither woman is entirely blameless. Neither is entirely innocent. Mandy makes choices that are difficult to defend. The other woman made choices that are difficult to forgive. The book sits in that gray area for most of its runtime, which is where Picoult tends to do her best work.

I picked it up because I was looking for something familiar to read on a long flight, and it delivered exactly what I expected. Nothing more, nothing less. It ran about as long as her other novels, somewhere in the three hundred to four hundred page range depending on the edition.

The Structure and Pacing

Picoult structures this with alternating POVs and flashbacks that reveal pieces of the husband's deception gradually. The flashbacks are not always clearly marked, which can be disorienting if you are not paying close attention. I found myself occasionally flipping back a few pages to figure out whose head I was in during a particular scene. The middle section drags a bit. There is a subplot involving a legal or insurance complication that goes on longer than necessary. It could have been trimmed by maybe fifty pages without losing anything important. Picoult does this in most of her books. She pads the middle with procedural details that slow the momentum before the climax picks back up.

How It Compares to Her Other Work

If you have read My Sister's Keeper or The Storyteller, you already know what you are getting. The legal ethics angle is lighter here than in My Sister's Keeper. The unreliable narrator element is absent compared to The Storyteller. This sits somewhere in the middle of her bibliography in terms of ambition and execution. It is not her strongest book, but it is not her weakest either. People who tend to dismiss Picoult as lightweight fiction might actually find something to engage with here, specifically around how she treats grief and betrayal without resorting to easy answers. The ending is satisfying without being neat, which is a balance she hits better than most commercial authors. There is a scene about halfway through where Mandy considers confronting the other woman directly, and the way Picoult writes that internal debate is genuinely good. You feel the pull between revenge and curiosity and the weird empathy that develops even when you know you should not develop it. That is the part of the book that lingers.

Who Should Read It

If you want dense literary fiction with experimental structure, this is not it. If you want a fast-paced thriller with plot twists every twenty pages, this is not it either. This is a character-driven domestic drama that moves at a moderate pace and asks you to sit with uncomfortable feelings for a while. The audiobook version is decent. The narrators handle the dual POV structure adequately, though they do not do wildly distinctive voices, which is fine because the narration style suits the material. The print edition is the usual trade paperback format you would expect from a major publisher release in this genre. I have read about twelve Picoult novels over the years. With Care sits comfortably in the middle tier of her output. It is worth reading if you are already a fan. If you are testing her work for the first time, you might want to start with Singular Errors or Handle with Care instead, since those represent her tighter writing. But With Care will not disappoint you if you go in with realistic expectations, which is probably the most useful advice I can offer about almost anything Picoult has published.