My Sister's Keeper: A Novel

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate -- a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister -- and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you? Once again, in My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult tackles a controversial real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity.

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


Oh, if she'd only stopped twenty pages before it actually ended.   October 16, 2006
Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
49 out of 56 found this review helpful

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 cliche, 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)


Cue the violins for this Lifetime movie   April 19, 2004
Alyssa M. Bance (St. Paul, MN)
28 out of 36 found this review helpful

First rule of choosing a book: if the author's name is in larger type than the book's title, then it probably isn't very good. Jodi Picoult reached that point with her previous novel, Second Glance, and unfortunately this rule is holding true for her.

Picoult's an excellent writer, but My Sister's Keeper is terrible. First she falls into her usual trap of assuming that her female target audience can't appreciate a thoughtful, well-told story without the inclusion of a romantic subplot - here it is even more tacked-on and gratuitous than in her other novels. Then she throws in a distracting gimmick - here, it is the lawyer's "shocking" medical secret, which is telegraphed from the beginning, has nothing to do with Anna's case, and after the buildup throughout the novel, is neatly deflated and disposed of after its "dramatic" use. Finally, she ends the book in such a way that all the chapters before are essentially pointless, as Picoult realizes she has painted herself into a legally correct but morally distasteful corner and needs a deus ex machina to fix the situation.

I really wanted to like this book - Picoult has a gift for description and if at times her dialogue is wooden, her ideas are intriguing enough to make her books compelling, one-sitting reads, even with their usual 400+ page length. But as in the past, I've raced through her latest novel only to be disappointed and vaguely disgusted at the end.


One of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read   July 15, 2007
J. A. Davis (Northern Michigan)
27 out of 28 found this review helpful

I've always been impressed with the subject matters that Jodi Picoult takes on with each of her books, but this one by far was the most controversial. What I loved about this book were the various narratives that told an emotionally-charged story revolving around genetic planning. There was Anna, the teenager conceived for the purpose of saving her sister's life, their mother (an attorney fighting for her older daughter's life), troubled older brother Jesse, and Anna's attorney (she hired him to sue her parents for medical emancipation). Once I started, I honestly could not put this book down - and my opinions of who was doing the right thing teetered back and forth until the shocking conclusion. Some may not like the ending, but I thought it was brilliant! Excellent writing does not, and should not, constitute a neatly wrapped-up fairy-tale ending. This certainly is a story that will leave you thinking and re-thinking your beliefs about life and what it takes to sustain it.