My Sister's Keeper
by Jodi Picoult
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Book Reviews of My Sister's Keeper
Book Review: Good read, but some unnecessary/illogical parts
Summary: 3 Stars
First of all, let me tell you that I love the book. It was a great read, kept me interested, and a fitting ending. I loved how Picoult developed the characters. While many books that are narrated by more than one person in first person turn out to be duds or seem like they could have easily been written in third person. However, this book was meant to be written in multiple points of views. I love when the characters think. Picoult has a way of stepping into every single character's shoes. Many of the thoughts of characters are just...the only word I have is "perfect". Right on the dot.
However, there are a few things I did not like.
1. The whole Julia and Campbell romance. Picoult has a format. If you have read enough of her books, you'll fine the same things - overprotective mom, trial, lawyer subplot. The Campbell and Julia romance was very unrealistic and...just slightly pointless. I mean, you have a high school boyfriend, a serious one. Then, the boy has a seizure, diagnosed with epilepsy, doesn't want to tell the girl so she doesn't need to live with someone who has seizures, so both go their separate ways, many, many years later the girl (woman now) has been moping around about it for all those years. Wow.
2. If you have read this book, there is a part where Anna is just walking along and a hockey team needs someone to play goalie so they can practice shooting goals. Anna is ten then, and has never played hockey and as far as the reader knows, never ice skated. Well, she is so good that she is invited onto the team as a goalie. First of all, that would not happen for two reasons. One, really? Picking up a random little girl to have her play goalie? Why doesn't coach or someone on the team do it? Second, you don't know hockey and apparently, neither does Jodi Picoult. Hockey is a game in which you must know how to skate. You must. Even the kid who is nineteen and has played hockey since age four can't skate well enough. To play hockey, you need to know how to be ice skating without looking down, dribbling a puck, not looking at the puck - it's hard. And a goalie's job is harder. A goalie...even hockey players calls goalies crazy. A goalie needs to move side to side on ice and...it's just illogical. Why did Picoult put in that Anna played hockey? Because Anna is the goalie and she saves...and the book is about how Anna was born to save her sister. It's kind of forced, it seems like.
Well, Anna is invited to a camp for hockey and she cannot go because her mother wants her home in case Kate has an emergency or something. Somewhere in that part, there is a typo. The word "staff" is spelled "stafff".
3. The whole trial. Don't get me wrong. I loved the book, the idea, etc. However, the trial for the kidney...if Anna didn't want to, since she is thirteen she would not have to anyway. Even blood draws in the future, one, seriously Anna? It's a blood draw. You can do it, can't you? And two, she would not be legally obligated to have blood drawn for her sister. The kidney, not that's a major surgery and the loss of an organ. That, I understand, but she wouldn't have to to that anyway. She wouldn't have to do any of it. There was no point in her suing her parents.
Okay, if you read all of that, you probably assume that I hate the book, but even if I cannot convince you this is true, I liked it. It was a good read. I just think it should have been thought through a little more.
Book Review: Another timely addition to Picoult's impressive library of contemporary fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult, is a heart-rending family saga. The story revolves around a moral dilemma: is it ethical to conceive one child for the sole purpose of saving another? Gravely ill, Kate was a toddler when she was diagnosed with a progressive form of leukemia. In a last ditch effort to save their beloved child, Sara and Brian Fitzgerald conceive a biologically engineered daughter for her umbilical cord, tissues, blood, and ultimately an organ. Anna literally becomes her sister's keeper for as long as she's alive. When it comes to donating her kidney to her dying sister, Anna seeks legal representation for the freedom to make her own medical decisions. Anna's courage holds the family together while at the same time tearing them apart.
Best-selling author Picoult formulates entire stories based on current issues and successfully weaves tales that explore both sides of an argument. Society now has the ability to tamper with genetics, to experiment on human subjects in the name of science and medicine, but does that mean it is permissible, ethical, and in humanity's best interests? My Sister's Keeper serves to clarify as much as confuse because there aren't clear-cut right or wrong answers when love and emotion collide with rational judgment. It comes down to what role love plays in making tough decisions. Who has the final say over a minor's destiny? Should an adolescent be granted permission to make a potentially life and death decision, or should her parents be ultimately responsible?
Picoult presents worst-case scenarios of both the patient, Kate, and the donor, Anna. She uses crisp and witty dialogue to reveal the path each girl has chosen and gives readers insight from a teen's perspective, complete with all the sibling rivalry and closeness two sisters can share. From the opening pages, the author grips the reader's heart and doesn't let go. We see the mental and emotional anguish inside the adults who play key roles in these two children's lives. Picoult provides multiple first-person points of view, which give glimpses into the entire family's well-being and affirms the intense love of parent for child and sibling for sibling. She deftly reveals the impact that lawyers, doctors, judges, other family members, and friends have on the entire family unit.
Read My Sister's Keeper and discover the many, many ways in which Picoult illuminates everyday experiences and, by her craft as an author, lifts them from the mundane to the extraordinary. While one's heart aches, one's spirit is enriched from living life through another's eyes. Picoult is a master at giving us such glimpses.
by Cheri Rosenberg
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Book Review: Cheesy "Sophie's Choice" Wannabe -- But Picoult is no Styron
Summary: 1 Stars
Thirteen-year old Anna, conceived by her parents in a petri dish and biologically engineered to be a perfect genetic match for her older sister, Kate, who has a rare form of cancer, is suing for "medical emancipation" in order to gain control of her own body. After years of painful blood and bone marrow donations, Anna finally puts her foot down and hires an attorney when her mother demands one of Anna's kidneys for the dying sixteen-year old Kate.
Some of the ethical issues raised by this novel could have been really interesting, poignant and dramatic in capable hands. But this author comes across as so indulgent and pleased with her own voice as a writer that she has created a flatulent, overblown 400-page melodramatic soap opera instead of a tight, well-written, well-reasoned novel. The book is not only cheap and cheesy -- it's insultingly unbelievable and ill-imagined. Picoult owes an apology to those people (doctors, lawyers, patients and donors) who really have to deal with these sensitive issues.
Obviously trying (and NOT succeeding) to emulate William Styron, Picoult creates a myriad of subplots and minor characters which detract from her main story line, and also manage to insult the reader's intelligence. What adult in today's society doesn't know that there are service dogs who do more than guide blind people? I certainly don't know anyone that uninformed, or unsophisticated. But this author keeps up a running unfunny "joke" throughout the book about Anna's lawyer and his constant need to explain to people that he is not blind just because he needs a service dog. What family court judge in ANY circumstance (and I am married to a judge, so I asked) would allow a mother to be opposing counsel to her own daughter in a court case? None! The conflict of interest issues stagger the mind.
I think what I am most angry about in reading this book is my reason for reading it in the first place. My daughter is attending a university in the fall -- a major university, mind you -- and this piece of trash is the "Freshman Experience" book which all the incoming class is assigned to read for discussion in English and Sociology survey classes. I am livid that the English department at a major state university chose this book to force upon young minds. Last year's incoming class got Jeanette Walls' masterful "The Glass Castle", and my child has to read the equivalent of a month's story arc on "All My Children."
This book is not literature. This author is a hack. And I am seriously thinking of asking my daughter to reconsider her choice of university.
Book Review: Wonderful, well worth the tears.
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw the preview for the movie and thought "Oh no way would I put myself through what looks like an emotional roller coaster." Then I saw that it was based on a book and suddenly, I wanted to read it.
Because I'm weird like that.
So, I read the book knowing about as much as you do after watching the preview... there is a family with a sick daughter and another daughter (younger) who doesn't want to be the organ/blood/tissue/whatever donor for her sister. She gets a lawyer and sues for the right to not have to. Everyone supposedly learns about love and family and sacrifice.
The book, thank goodness is a bit more than that.
Jodi Picoult weaves the story together with multiple narrators, the suing sister Ana is our main character but we also get the perspective of her parents, her lawyer, her brother, and her court appointed liaison. (We don't get the sick sister's point of view until the end... a choice that is beautiful executed and almost not noticeable.)
Along the way we learn about not just Ana, but about her whole family... how everyone is affected by the sickness of Kate.
The book is amazingly well written, careful and poetic while being totally believable and charming even as it treads on very shaky emotional ground. This is a story that could lend itself very easily to a caricature of heroes and villains but it manages to make everyone more human than epic.
Such is the case of the mother, Sarah, who is very human... very flawed... and even though you want to understand her, even though Picoult gives you all you need to see why she makes the choices she makes... she is never anywhere as sympathetic as Ana. Her obsession, her coldness, her fear is, again, understandable but we never really warm up to her.
I will say that maybe having Sarah as a character who we can't wholly get behind helps keep the story focused on Ana... but I would also point out that had Picoult made her more likable, the drama at the end would have been better.
This separation that is there though makes the book fraught with tension and also supremely realistic.
From a reader's standpoint, it is an easy read as far as words and chapters are concerned but it is a difficult read as you watch a family at the edge of implosion.
And then the ending comes along, knocks you on your rear end, and leaves you torn.
I highly recommend the book.... With a poetic prose that is clear and yet strangely cryptic, this book will hold you in thrall all the way through.
Book Review: A good book that is RUINED by its horrible ending
Summary: 1 Stars
With the movie about to come out, I thought I should review this book to warn people about it. DON'T BOTHER!
I actually really enjoyed the book (even with the rather clunky writing and unsubtle characterizations), and then the ending comes and I start screaming "What? You've gotta be kidding me!" It betrayed the entire premise of the book. It betrayed the characters. It certainly betrayed the reader. I will never read another book by this purveyor of pulp, and I refuse to go see the movie unless I am assured beforehand that they have re-written the ending so it makes sense with the rest of the story.
Specifically, and these are spoilers: what I got from the book was that the mother was so determined to save her older daughter, Kate, that she had totally lost her moorings. Kate was suffering unbearably, and so were her other children and her husband. So Anna, the younger daughter, takes a stand on Kate's behalf, and says stop, Kate should decide when enough is enough and this is it. Kate has decided she has fought through ten years of misery just to take another breath, but that's not enough. She wants a quality of life that she just can't have. So she is going to step back, let her sister and her family live their lives, and accept her own lot in life. I thought that was a very moving and interesting perspective.
Then, the end of this stupid book happens. Anna and Kate win their court case. They get to make their own medical decisions. Except they don't. "Fate" intervenes. Anna is killed in a stupid, cheap car crash. And suddenly her kidney, which was the point of the whole book, is basically up for grabs. So Kate just takes it. Even though the whole point of her character throughout the book was that she was done with medical procedures, suddenly the fact that her sister is a dead donor, instead of a perfectly willing live donor, makes her change her whole philosophy. And she takes the kidney. And she lives. So, it turns out that the mother was right all along. The girls were just "acting out," I guess. If they had just accepted one more medical procedure, everything would have been rosy. The whole premise of the book as I understood it -- that sometimes adolescents can see things adults can't, and can earn the right to determine their own destiny -- was just total b.s. Mommy always knows best. Oh, I cannot begin to express how I hated this conclusion. It made me feel like the entire book was an ugly practical joke.