In addition to my Christmas shopping sprees, I've also been on a mini reading spree. During breaks from teaching I usually make it my mission to catch up on a few books that I've been promising to myself that I'd read. One of these was My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I was reluctant to give it a try because the numerous students who'd recommended it to me had a penchant for sappy Nicholas Sparks novels. The real reason I finally gave it a try was that I felt it was my duty to test it out because the topic of organ harvesting kept coming up in my class as my health tech students have been working on writing research papers connecting with health technologies.
I knew the book was about a little girl who was intended by her parents as being a donor match for her older sister, who had a form of childhood cancer. I also knew that the younger girl wasn't crazy about the "donations" she was "asked" to make for her sister because of the sheer intrusiveness of the procedures.
As I read, I found that the book was organized by chapters written from each character's perspective, except Kate's (the older sister who we finally hear from near the end). The story begins with a young woman/girl (approx. 12ish) named Anna who is in the process of saving up and purchasing the services of an attorney because she would like to have the legal right to her own body. As the story progresses, the reader finds out that Anna is a very mature young woman who has essentially been domineered by her parents love for her older sister, Kate. The middle child, Jesse, is a juvenile delinquent who has a fondness for arson. This is particularly ironic because his dad is a firefighter who has been trying to catch a pesky arsonist (his son).
While Anna toils with her decision to liberate herself, but essentially sign her sister's death certificate, the reader is able to see how much influence parents really do have on their minor children. The reader also becomes acquainted with Anna's lawyer, who has a service dog named Judge, and the child advocate who happens to have ridiculous sexual tension with the lawyer because the two had had an abrupt and unresolved breakup while dating in college.
The story is genuinely compelling because it's easy to see how Anna's parents are being divided by Kate's chronic illness(es) and the sexual tension gives the romance readers a little something to look forward to. It's also easy to see how Anna become dehumanized because of Kate's extreme threat of mortality.
The entire story pulled me through the pages because I was curious to see just how Anna was going to end up if she did win the case. She was definitely in a Catch-22 situation, so I was hoping the author was going to pull a clever ending together despite the appearance of a no-win situation. What's the author's solution? Deux ex machina. I saw it coming, because she'd dug herself too much of a hole. All bridges were burnt, so there was only one way out.
Was the read worthwhile? Yes-- because it explored a topic that many people may have otherwise never considered and it approached the topic through a relatively unbiased lens by involving so many characters' perspectives. Was is literary genius? Hardly. But, I can cross it off my list and I would recommend it to those readers curious about the topic or simply looking for a Nicolas Sparks stand-in.
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