My Sister's Keeper

When my group decided to read My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed because I wasn’t sure I wanted to have to recommend a book about a girl dying of leukemia. However, by the time I got 20 pages into the story, I realized I had it all wrong. What I mean is, the novel is sort of developed around a sixteen-year-old, Kate, who is dying, but the story is not really about her death. With its multiple first person narratives, it takes the reader into the daily lives of the family members who have had to live with the possibility of her death every day for fourteen years and how it has affected them all as a family and each one as an individual. It causes you as the reader to experience what life is like for Anna, Kate’s younger sister and genetic match, who has been used all her life as an organ donor to keep Kate alive. It examines the intricate relationship between sisters and the complications that can arise to disrupt the delicate balance when one is constantly overshadowed by the other. You see what a day in the life of Sara, the mother, entails, with nearly every moment engulfed in the desperation to keep her sick daughter from dying, to the point of neglecting her other children. The other characters involved also share their first person narratives each day during the two week period over which the book is written. The medical emancipation hearing Anna has begun in hopes that she can make the decision not to donate her kidney to Kate is a huge source of grief to her parents and is one of the main storylines in the book. It exposes the emotional and personal aspects to issues like quality of life and designer babies (babies who are genetically engineered for specific traits), challenging the reader to try and imagine how they would react to such complex situations. It dares you to choose somebody’s side, but as soon as you do, the perspective changes and you end up second guessing yourself. By the time you’re halfway through the book, you realize that the lines between what’s right and wrong, between what’s justified and what’s unfair, are so blurred and convoluted that they may not exist at all.
This book took me completely by surprise in how easily it sucked me in and made me care about each character and what was happening in each of their lives. I’ve read so many books over the years that anymore it takes a really good writer telling a really captivating story for me to get as attached to a book as I did to this one. That being said, when I got to the end, I was so emotionally invested that I had to stay in my room and reflect for awhile before getting on with my life. I realize how cheesy that probably sounds, but I admit it because a book that has that big of an impact on me is the kind I will be passing on.