Sleep toward Heaven and Handle With Care

I've been back on a bit of a reading kick lately, and polished off two books in the last week!


In Sleep Toward Heaven, we meet three women who lead very different lives--a 29 year old female awaiting execution on death row in Texas, a 29 year old doctor from New York who has just lost a patient that she was close to, and a Texas librarian struggling to reclaim her life after the death of her husband.

It was a little slow and melodramatic at first, but keep reading--there's much more to the story than first meets the eye.

This is one that I'd definitely recommend reading--and when was the last time I said THAT?!


Now, I think some of you probably remember me saying that I like Jodi Picoult, but that we've been on a break. This was partially because I've read almost all her books and was getting tired of her writing style (and could usually pretty quickly predict the ending of the book). I've had this book for awhile, but haven't read it because it's about a very fragile baby--a baby with brittle bone disease. And for my own sanity, I've been trying to stay away from books where babies have the propensity to die. Anyway.

From the inside jacket:

“Things break all the time.
Day breaks, waves break, voices break.
Promises break.
Hearts break.

Every expectant parent will tell you that they don’t want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they’d been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of “luckier” parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it’s all worth it because Willow is, well, funny as it seems, perfect. She’s smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health.

Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte should have known earlier of Willow’s illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life?"

Overall, it was shaping up to be a half-decent book. But I couldn't help but thinking 'I've read this before!' and it wasn't until the last chapter that I realized that I had read this book before. Or virtually the same book, also by Jodi Picoult. It's My Sister's Keeper...even the endings are strikingly similar [and ps--please no spoilers about the ending of my Sister's Keeper...I know there's at least one person who reads this blog that's currently in the middle of it!]. I'm really sad about this. I was counting on this book to be the one that sent me back into Jodi Picoult's arms. Unfortunately, I just can't recommend it, unless you haven't (and won't ever) read My Sister's Keeper. 'Cause really, that's the better book of the two.

So what about you all--what are you reading?