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My Sisters Keeper -2004 publication.
 
 
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My Sisters Keeper -2004 publication. [Paperback]

Jodi Picoult (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,468 customer reviews) |

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Book Description

Publication Date: 2004
PAPERBACK

Product Details

  • Paperback
  • Publisher: Pocket (2004)
  • ISBN-10: 1439163855
  • ISBN-13: 978-1439163856
  • Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,468 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #690,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Jodi Picoult Page
Jodi Picoult
I grew up on Long Island with my parents and my little brother, the product of a ridiculously happy childhood. My mom says I've been writing as long as she remembers - my first masterpiece was "The Lobster That Was Misunderstood," at age 5. I honed my writing skills beyond that, one hopes, before I headed off to Princeton, where I wanted to work with living, breathing authors in their creative writing program. Mary Morris was my teacher/mentor, and I really do believe I wouldn't be where I am today if not for her guidance and expertise. I had two short stories published in SEVENTEEN magazine when I was in college. However, when I graduated, a desire to not eat ramen noodles exclusively and to be able to pay my rent led me to take a job on Wall Street (not a great idea, since I can't even balance my checkbook). When the stock market crashed in 1987, I moved to Massachusetts and over the course of two years, worked at a textbook publishing company, taught creative writing at a private school, became an ad copywriter, got a master's in education at Harvard, got married, taught at a public school, and had a baby. My first novel was published shortly after my son was born, and I've always said that the reason I kept writing is because it's so much easier than teaching English.

In fourteen years, I've published thirteen novels: Songs of the Humpback Whale, Harvesting the Heart, Picture Perfect, Mercy, The Pact, Keeping Faith, Plain Truth, Salem Falls, Perfect Match, Second Glance, My Sister's Keeper, Vanishing Acts, and the upcoming The Tenth Circle, this March. Two of my books (Plain Truth and The Pact) were made into Lifetime TV movies; Keeping Faith will be another. My Sister's Keeper is in development at New Line Cinema to be a feature film. And there isn't a single day that I don't stop and marvel at the fact that when I go to work, I get to do what I love the most.

My husband Tim and I live in Hanover, NH with our three kids, a dog, a rabbit, and the occasional donkey or cow.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
222 of 244 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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

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300 of 345 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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)
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81 of 90 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Heartwrenching and beautiful
A realistic glimpse inside a family. I've noticed that a lot of the books that make me cry are the ones that get added to my favorites list. Read more
Published 10 hours ago by Nascar Pryncess
Loved it from the first paragraph.
This was the first selection for a small book club I joined. Others had read the book and seen the movie, giving rave reviews. Read more
Published 2 days ago by 4crittersmee
Beautiful, Poetic, Emotional
This was my first Jodi Picoult novel, and now I'm an eternal fan. The writing was simply poetic. I've never read an author that had such a beautiful and imaginative way with words. Read more
Published 15 days ago by Lia Fairchild (Author of In Search of Lucy)
Unresolved Issues
I read My Sister's Keeper for the first time as a part of the 2012 World Book Night. Picoult is a captivating and suspenseful writer. Read more
Published 20 days ago by Jennifer
Good Book
I really liked this book. I love how the story is told from each character's point of view, it makes you really get to know each of them.
Published 24 days ago by Ro
My Sister's Keeper a Must Read
This was the first of Jodi Picoult's books that I read. This story stirred concerns on many levels. Read more
Published 24 days ago by Vermonter
The only interesting thing about the book is dissolved by the end
It is a mediocre book, at best. The plot lines are not credible. The characters one dimensional. The only thing this book has going for it is an interesting ethical dilemma. Read more
Published 27 days ago by V. Williams
My sisters keeper was like no book i've read before
My Sister's Keeper is a story of a young girl, Anna, who sues her parents for the medical rights to her own body. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Summer Spiva
I cried so much reading this!
Boy does this author know how to pluck your heart strings. Seriously, I think I cried for like an hour straight while reading this. It's sad, it's lovely. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Stylist4u
Never Again
I really liked the idea of this book, I liked the fact that it wasn't your typical "cancer story" book. Read more
Published 1 month ago by June B Hart
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