My Sister’s Keeper

Review ebook My Sister’s Keeper

**If you’re planning on reading this book, don’t read my review. I give away the horribly disappointing ending. On second thought, don’t read this book, read my review.**

I know several people who have read this book, so I decided to give it a go. I was immediately intrigued by the subject of the book. The Fitzgerald family has one daughter, Kate, dying of kidney failure. The kidney failure is a result of her weary body’s 14 year battle with a rare form of leukemia. Their other daughter, Anna, i **If you’re planning on reading this book, don’t read my review. I give away the horribly disappointing ending. On second thought, don’t read this book, read my review.**

I know several people who have read this book, so I decided to give it a go. I was immediately intrigued by the subject of the book. The Fitzgerald family has one daughter, Kate, dying of kidney failure. The kidney failure is a result of her weary body’s 14 year battle with a rare form of leukemia. Their other daughter, Anna, is a perfect donor match to Kate. The fact that Anna is a perfect match is no surprise considering Anna was conceived with Kate in mind. Anna was no accident; doctors specifically chose the embryo that would be a perfect genetic match for Kate’s needs.

Now thirteen years later, and several procedures later, Anna is refusing to donate a kidney. She seeks the legal help of Campbell Alexander, and together they petition the court for Anna’s medical emancipation from her parents. Anna’s argument is compelling. Simply, she argues “it never stops.” When Anna was born they gave her cord blood to Kate. Later Anna gave lymphocytes, then bone marrow, then granulocytes, then peripheral blood stem cells. And now she is expected to give a kidney. Anna feels like she only exists to perpetuate Kate’s existence. At this point doctors don’t even believe Kate would survive a kidney transplant, but her parents still want the procedure done.

This is a fascinating plot, since there are no clear cut right/wrong answers. How do you weight the lives of these two young girls? The author came up with a brilliant grey pool of possibilities.

But the book sank.

While the writing is exceptional in small burst, it’s most often barely digestible and often painful. The story is told from each characters’ point of view, and this leads to a lot of flashbacks and unnecessary digressions. The flashbacks of the mother, Sara, are necessary as she tells the history of Kate’s illness. But were also given a side plot between Campbell and Julia, Anna’s guardian ad litem. And I promise that the author’s writing takes a sudden dive for the ‘painful’ end of the spectrum when Julia is speaking. I was bored with the lame history of the high school romance between Campbell and Julia. They had a sudden breakup, and now 15 years later they still secretly pine for one another – blah. Let me first say that if my high school sweetheart broke my heart and I still haven’t gotten over it FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, slap the shit out me!

The plot is stupid: Julia was the poor girl that ended up in a rich school her oh-so-loving parents desperately got her into. She’s the rebel with pink hair and no friends. Campbell is drawn to her because apparently no other girl in his rich kid school thought to dye their hair. Apparently rich kids don’t do such crazy things.

What was even worse was the dialogue between Julia and Campbell or Julia and her sister. A lot of horrible one-liners; just awful dialogue in general. I blame Picoult’s editor. Why wasn’t she told to cut all this crap out?

The story when told through Jesse, the 18-year-old delinquent brother of Anna and Kate, is also generally ridiculous. We’re given more cheesy dialogue and digressions that add very little to the main plot.
Picoult could’ve easily cut out about 200 pages and had a much better story.

Although the stories of Jesse, Campbell, and Julia are irritating, nothing is more infuriating than how the author ties up the story in the end. She creates this wonderful dilemma but (and here’s where I get nasty) doesn’t have the talent to pull it off. Instead of wading around in the murkiness of deciding between the possibility of saving one life (if only for a short while) and respecting the life and decisions of another, Picoult takes the easy way out. When on the stand, Anna now explains that she not only started the petition for personal or selfish reasons, but because Kate secretly asked her too. While this might be a very probable scenario in real life – a chronically ill patient simply wanting it to all end – I was interested in seeing where Picoult could take us without this shortcut. The starting topic no longer becomes such a controversy when the recipient doesn’t want what the donor is offering. That’s right, we learn that Anna was willing to donate her kidney until Kate told her not to. (Can you see the satin bow coming out, about to be neatly tied around all of this?)

In the end, Anna is granted medical emancipation from her parents. Even still, Anna considers giving her kidney to Kate. On one hand she doesn’t want to lose her sister, but another part of her realizes her life may be better once Kate is dead. But we never learn what Anna decides in the end, because the author commits the ultimate cop out. She kills Anna off. Anna gets into a horrible car accident where she’s conveniently made brain dead, but still physically alive so her organs can be harvested. That’s right! Kate gets her kidney after all and lives! This ending was complete bullshit. The ethical and moral questions that set this book up were abandoned in the end. In the end, no tough decisions needed to be made.

Eight years later, Kate is alive and well. Her parents, although deeply effected by Anna’s death, have managed to pull themselves back together. We’re told that Brian, the father, had a drinking problem for a while after Anna’s death, but not to worry – he clawed his way back to the family. Good for him. And Jesse the badass teenager who made moonshine in his room, dropped LSD, and who, oh by the way, was an ARSONIST, is now a decorated police officer. How nice; glad that whole setting elementary schools on fire stage passed for him.

I felt that throughout the book the author was making a case for Anna and how invisible she felt in her own family. Anna desperately wanted to be in charge of her own life. Anna wanted to be seen as an individual, not Kate’s lifeline. Instead of Kate always being giving a chance, Anna wanted a chance to become her own person. In the end, her creator, her author, didn’t even care enough to find out what that might mean.
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