My Sister's Keeper in The Dusty Bookshelf

Jul 15, 2012 Kristina rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My Sister's Keeper is what I like to call a "cheap book." It lures you in with its controversial topic, keeps you reading with endless mini-cliff hangers and moves you to tears with passages calculated to stir your emotions. Of course, that's exactly what one should expect when they pick up a book by Jodi Picoult, a writer who is probably making money angels right now in the piles of cash she's earned from capitalizing on the tender hearts of women. I don't even mean that in a bad way. It's what My Sister's Keeper is what I like to call a "cheap book." It lures you in with its controversial topic, keeps you reading with endless mini-cliff hangers and moves you to tears with passages calculated to stir your emotions. Of course, that's exactly what one should expect when they pick up a book by Jodi Picoult, a writer who is probably making money angels right now in the piles of cash she's earned from capitalizing on the tender hearts of women. I don't even mean that in a bad way. It's what everyone knows they're getting when they open a book like this- a book where the author's name is printed bigger than the title. A script for a chick flick. Truthfully, if you're looking for a fast-paced, interesting, easy read, you could do worse than this book. It's just that a book like this has a ceiling on how good it can be.

This book centers around a 13 year old girl named Anna Fitzgerald. She was conceived using in-vitro fertilization as a perfect donor match for her sister Kate, who was diagnosed with a rare and tricky form of leukemia. The original intention of her parents was for Anna to donate only cord blood to her sister, but when Kate's cancer returns, she is expected to donate more and more genetic material (like blood and bone marrow) in the hopes of curing her. When she is asked to donate a kidney, she decides that enough is enough and hires a lawyer to sue her parents for the right to make her own medical decisions.

First, the good: No matter your feelings on books like these, this is an interesting plot. I read this one quickly to see how the story would unfold. It asks a lot of interesting questions about parental responsibilities, maturity, and self-sacrifice vs. self-preservation. The characters in the story are put into an impossible situation with no true good choices. They all seemed like good people who were trying their best to survive under extraordinary circumstances, and it put me into the mindset of constantly wondering what I would do if I were in their shoes.

So it had a promising storyline. Now for the bad. I have a few points to make here.

1. The storyline with Campbell, Anna's lawyer and Julia, Anna's guardian ad litem was boring and completely unnecessary. I found myself feeling very irritated when I would get to a section dealing with them. Honestly, what are the odds that these two would have been old flames back in high school with a rocky past? It was a coincidence that felt very forced. Their inclusion in this novel seemed like a ploy to make the book longer or to draw out fake suspense by getting away from the Fitzgerald family every so often. While I'm on these two, are seizure dogs really a great mystery to anyone anymore? I knew that's what Judge was for when I realized that Campbell wasn't blind. Also, is epilepsy something that a normal person would consider to be a deal-breaker in a relationship? The idea that you would have to abandon a relationship because you have epilepsy and don't want to tie someone down is ridiculous. Their story didn't make sense all the way around. So boring.

2. Anna was written inconsistently. She was too smart and sassy in her internal monologue and too childish in her external actions. Her inside and her outside just didn't match up and that continually bothered me. It's like Picoult made her smart and rational when it was convenient to the story and made her scared and weak when she needed to create tension.

3. The ending was a betrayal to the reader. That sounds awfully dramatic, but it's how I feel. Throughout the story all of these great, interesting questions are raised. Anna wins her medical emancipation case and is finally in charge of her own body. She had to make a hard decision in the story, one with difficult consequences. It would have been nice to see the natural outcome of those decisions. t would have been nice to see how Anna and Kate and the rest of the family came to terms with what happened. Instead, here comes the surprise ending! Picoult destroys the moment she has been building up to by killing Anna in a car wreck on her way home from the courthouse. Good thing her kidney is still okay. After all that, Kate winds up with the kidney anyway and she miraculously gets better. Obviously, an organ transplant is not a cure for leukemia, so the cure really is a miracle. Kate closes the book by saying that Anna took her place in heaven. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

This could have easily been a 3 or 4 star book without the ludicrous manufactured drama of the ending. Why bother to ask the hard questions and explore such difficult topics if you're just going to throw it all away with a "shocking" ending? It's a trap designed by Picoult to trick her readers into thinking she's done something profound and edgy. All she's done is throw away anything that was good about her story. What a waste.

Not a favorite of mine, especially due to the ending. It wasn't bad for a quick read when you aren't in the mood to think too much. ...more

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