Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295961 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Customer Reviews

Complex issues in a fascinating story
Jodi Picoult has masterfully covered yet another controversial topic in her novel "My Sister's Keeper." This time, young Kate is diagnosed with a severe form of leukemia. Her parents then have a baby, Anna, who is genetically selected to be a close donor match for Kate. From her birth onward into her early teens, Anna is called upon to undergo increasingly invasive and dangerous procedures to provide blood, bone marrow, and other tissues to sustain her older sister's life. Now, a kidney is needed, and Anna brings a lawsuit against her parents, claiming the right to her make own decision about what medical procedures can be performed on her. Anna's mother Sara, an attorney, decides to represent her own daughter Kate at the trial.

There are some very difficult questions raised in this story. Does Anna have the obligation to risk her own health to save her sister? Do her parents have the right to make the medical decisions about Anna's donor role, and where should their loyalties lie? Where is the fine line between what is legal and what is ethical in a situation like this? There seem to be no right or wrong answers here, and the ensuing trial recounts all the physical, moral, psychological, and familial struggles that are brought to bear on the issue. Picoult paints a powerfully emotional picture of a family in turmoil. She adds additional tension to the story through brother Jesse, whose drug taking and criminal tendencies add even more burdens to an already overwrought situation. The story also includes the love/hate relationship between Anna's lawyer and her legal guardian.

The narrative switches from character to character so that the reader hears the voices of each family member, as well as that of Anna's lawyer and of the legal guardian appointed to watch out for her interests. Sara's narrative includes flashbacks on the history of Kate's illness, Anna's role in providing medical support, and the toll that the constant threat of Kate's death takes on the family. There are several shocking twists to the plot that make the story even more riveting. This is Picoult's best book yet!

Eileen Rieback

Oh, if she'd only stopped twenty pages before it actually ended.
Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper (Washington Square Press, 2004)

Did you ever start off reading a book with a relatively high opinion of it, and then have that opinion spiral downward every few pages until it just bottomed out at the end? That's how I felt while reading My Sister's Keeper.

Picoult has a great hook-- a child, conceived for the purpose of keeping her leukemic older sister alive, sues her parents for medical emancipation-- and she starts out defining her characters well, giving us a stable of interesting people about whom to read. It all, however, goes downhill from there. Picoult has that rare and undesirable combination of a taste for melodrama and a fine ear for cliché, and it's so well-mixed that even the quotes she chooses at the beginnings of sections are fraught with both. (When you see Milton's long-trampled quote about darkness visible in a book, what's going to happen? Yes, you know.) At over four hundred pages, the writing style just wears you down. Then characters start to slip from three-dimensional model into two-dimensional archetype, and either Picoult's own prejudices, or her attempts to manipulate the reader, start to show through. The rise of this trait and the rise of the melodrama, not surprisingly, go hand in hand. As the characters get less and less three-dimensional, they get more grating. This is especially true in the case of Sara, the mother involved; by page three hundred, I was marveling that no other character in the novel had simply killed her in her sleep to put her out of everyone else's misery.

And then comes the ending. Holy cow, the awful, horrible, cheesy, syrupy, lowest-common-denominator, you could see it coming from so far away because it was as big as Jupiter's great red spot, Lifetime Original Movie(TM) ending. It was like a punch in the stomach to have come this far with these characters and then have the author take the path of least resistance. If you read this book, when you get to page 350 or thereabouts, stop, take a bunch of index cards, and write down all the possible ways you think this book might end. Rank them in terms of desirability. I guarantee that the end of this book will be the one you put at the absolute bottom of the stack. It's THAT bad.

I probably should have waited a few days to write this review in order to mellow over the awfulness of the ending, but the simple truth is, the book doesn't deserve any mellowing out. The author pulled a cheap shot. There's no reason the reviewer shouldn't as well. It starts out a relatively decent book. By its end, it is unbearably awful. (half)

Take interesting topic, add loathesome characters and plenty of useless padding
Dear God, how I hated the characters in this book.

I read My Sister's Keeper after reading a blurb about it. The topic fascinated me: what would a child conceived to "save" a sibling think as they grew older? Especially if the "saving" part went on and on and on.

The books starts with that child, Anna, going to a lawyer to get out of her role as genetic donor on call. So far, so good. It's a soapy, Lifetime movie idea but I've nothing against a soapy story. Middlemarch and War and Peace have their soapy elements too. The problem isn't the soapiness, it's that Picoult keeps adding the soap, piling on sub-plots and adding quirks to her characters until, frankly, I wanted to kill them myself. You'll rarely find a less likable group of characters than the adults on display in this book.

Campbell Alexander, the lawyer Anna hires, is standard issue "selfish, self-absorbed, morally questionable attorney who only wants to win." His quirk is that he has a service dog but HE ISN'T BLIND. Gee, I wonder what the reason could be. Seriously, is there anyone with half a brain who can't think of the one other reason an adult would have a service dog? There must be loads because Picoult treats this as a big mystery even though every chapter from Campbell's point of view has him telling someone that "Judge" (get it, a lawyer with a dog named "Judge"? Wow.) is a service dog. I wish that Judge's service job would have been to bite Campbell on the leg everytime Campbell said the words "service dog" or at least to chomp on him whenever he was a jerk but, alas, Judge just trots around witnessing this silliness.

Then there's Julia Romano, Anna's court appointed guardian and Campbell's old flame. What are the chances that these two would see each other again after he dumped her? Well, they do live in Rhode Island and both practice law in Providence so I guess the question really is how is it possible they haven't run into each other in the last 20 years? Julia is quirky too, she's a free spirit. I know this because Julia gives all her appliances names. Her refrigerator is called "Smilla." Yes, Julia is considered by a court to be responsible enough to look after the interests of a child despite the fact that she names inanimate objects and converses with them.

But once you've got a load of Anna's mother, Sara, you'll probably think even Smilla would be a better guardian. Sara is the least likable person in the book. Selfish, delusional, self-absorbed and self-enchanted, Sara ignores her son Jesse to the point that he becomes a pyromaniac, sees her daughter Anna as a walking donor and relentlessly insists on "saving" her daughter Kate without asking the teenager what she wants. Oh, and she orders designer gowns from BlueFly and returns them on a regular basis. Sara was a lawyer and when the courtroom scenes start, Sara decides to represent herself. And why not? It's smart, it's cheap, it's the sort of thing courts love and it just makes sense. Why should anyone else have the spotlight? I think Picoult meant Sara to be likable and slightly clueless about the impact of her actions. I wanted to throttle Sara.

Everyone in this book ruminates. About life. About death. About the stars. About their appliances. Instead of being thoughtful or deep it just grinds the story to a halt. It also made me wish these people would stop navel gazing and do something. Say what you will about Jesse and his little match-focused hobby, at least he gets out of the house once in a while.

It all comes down to a courtroom confrontation, just like in Perry Mason. Will Anna win her freedom? Will Sara make her see that she may feel guilty for letting Kate die? Will Kate ever stand up for herself? Will Campbell tell Julia the real reason he dumped her? Will someone, anyone, tell Sara to shut up?

Then there's the "twist" ending. I know some readers hated it so much it ruined the book for them. I was too far gone by then to think anything but "so this is what irony overload looks like." And that the RI DMV must have some interesting rules if Campbell can get a driver's license.

Picoult is capable of, and has written, much better. (See The Pact, for an example of Picoult on form.) She'd have done beter to have cut the story in half, dropped all the sub-plots and stuck to the main story. And had several characters slap Sara. Repeatedly.