My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult (2005, Paperback, Reprint)

Very factual, fictional account of a young girl who sues her parents to be medically emancipated. Anna was engineered in a dish to be an exact match for her sister Kate, who has leukemia. Kate should have never survived past 5 years old, but with Anna, she has made it to 15 and now needs a kidney. Jodi Picoult put a lot of research into the subject matter and comes away with a brilliant, touching story with a heart wrenching twist at the end, several actually. The chapters are titled for each character and each chapter relates to that character and their thoughts and interactions with the others. This was an excellent book and I can't wait to read more of her work.

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. 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!

This book by Jodi Picoult is rather different to what I usually read, which tends to be S-F, fantasy and detective/crime thrillers. I read the blurb on the back and I thought it was an interesting idea, and the ethical issues it brings up sold me on reading it.

It's about a family whose eldest daughter suffers from a very aggressive form of leukaemia, and they choose to have another child, genetically compatible with her, in order to help her fight against the cancer. A designer baby if you like. At first Anna their donor daughter's birth provides cord blood to help put Kate into remission. As she grows older, however, blood and bone marrow are needed when Kate relapses. Unlike the cord blood donation, these are invasive, painful procedures and pose some risk to Anna. But Kate's life is at stake. At 13, Anna's kidney is needed and it is at this point, that Anna gets herself a lawyer and asks to be medically emancipated from her parents.

The story is told from various viewpoints, in first person, and jumps around in time periods for the backstory.

I thought it was well-written, as all the characters of the family were sympathetically portrayed and you could understand and empathise with them. The pulls between wishing to save a sibling & wishing to be free of obligation, the difficulties of living in a family which has started to implode from the perpetual stresses, fears and demands of the sickness of one member were all well-drawn.

I felt that the plotline with the lawyer, Campbell, and the guardian ad litem, Julia, was totally superfluous. The love story/mystery ailment just seemed unnecessary and I found myself flipping through those bits..

The book was all about choices over your own body, parent/child relationships, and how to balance the needs of one child against those of another. It threw up some interesting questions. Ultimately I think it failed to deliver: I suspected the twists and felt the ending was a complete cop-out. That said, it was a good premise and well-written

Jodi Picoult chooses topics of current controversy and puts a personal face and offers the perspectives of the individuals involved. In My Sister's Keeper, the topic is organ donation. Kate is the young daughter of Sara and Brian who is diagnosed with a virulent form of leukimia at a young age. When no other family member is found to be a suitable match for bone marrow transplant, Sara and Brian concieve another child who is "genetically chosen" to be a perfect match for Kate. When Anna is born, her cord blood is used as a life saving transfusion for Kate. However, when Kate suffers further relapses of the disease, Anna is called upon to continue to donate and undergo increasingly more invasive procedures to keep her sister in remission. The dynamics of the family is severely affected by their continuing struggles with the disease and its effects.
Picoult uses 1st person point of view for all the characters, so that each chapter is told from the perspective of one individual's experiences and feelings with the situation.
Although parts of the book seem a little contrived and the characters somewhat unreal(the mother in particular), overall it is very well written and made for an excellent and absorbing read. I read this book for my book club, and 8 out of 10 people rated it as excellent. The other 2 readers liked it, but found fault with some of the writing.
Over all, I'd rate it as a great read!

My Sister’s Keeper is a poignant, uplifting, emotional, sad, triumphant, passionate, heartwrenching and extremely powerful story about the Fitzgeralds, a family united in their love for each other but divided on exactly where the boundaries of family obligations, love and sacrifice should end. But it is, ultimately, a story of two sisters, the unbreakable bond they share and how totally entwined they have been all their lives until a crucial decision threatens to tear them apart and ends up changing all the lives forever.

The Fitzgeralds - Brian, a firefighter and avid amateur astronomer, and Sara, a stay-at-home mother and ex-lawyer - have the perfect suburban family, but life changes irreversibly when Kate, now sixteen, is diagnosed at age two with leukemia. She develops what looks like "a line of small blue jewels" down her spine, and her mother knows immediately that she is not seeing normal bruises. The family doctor wants the tests repeated in the hospital hematology/oncology department. There, after a series of painful and invasive procedures, they learn that Kate suffers from "APL … a subgroup of myeloid leukemia. The rate of survival … is twenty to thirty percent, if treatment starts immediately." The treatments keep the disease at bay for about five years, until Kate's body explodes with runaway cancer cells. She desperately needs a bone marrow transplant or she will die. Her determined mother, on the advice of the doctor, persuades her husband to try for the "perfectly engineered baby."

Their other child, Jesse, is not a match, but now at thirteen, Anna has always been aware that she was "born for a specific purpose…a scientist managed to hook up [her] mother’s eggs" and her father’s sperm "to create a specific combination of precious genetic material," so that could she could be a bone marrow match for her sister Kate. When Kate needs leukocytes or stem cells or bone marrow "to fool her body into thinking it’s healthy," Anna has obediently stepped in. Everytime Kate is hospitalized so is she, which means Anna can never go away to soccer camp or even to college.

Until now, Anna has never questioned her role in life. But she says that "lately I have been having nightmares, where I’m cut into so many pieces that there isn’t enough of me to be put back together." The strain has been heavy on them all, especially Anna who says so bluntly - "I was never really a kid. To be honest, neither were Kate and Jesse…" And it is hard because they "practically set a place for Death at the dinner table." It does different things to them. Jesse is the wild kid who does drugs and plays with matches, gets arrested for stealing a judge’s car and is generally hopeless. But he is acting out is because he feels he is worthless, unable to help Kate. He calls himself "a lost cause."
This book ends with a sudden twist you dont see coming, a must have and a book that is very re-readable, love it