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216 of 238 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complex issues in a fascinating story, April 29, 2004
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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72 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A good book that is RUINED by its horrible ending, June 4, 2009
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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291 of 334 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Oh, if she'd only stopped twenty pages before it actually ended., October 16, 2006
This review is from: My Sister's Keeper: A Novel (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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