| Product: |
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult |
| Date: |
23/10/05 (394 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A compelling, well researched story of medical and family moral dilemmas.
Disadvantages: The American English that it is written in took me a little while to get used to.
On the front cover of this paperback is the question, “If you use one of your children to save the life of another, are you being a good mother or a very bad one?”
What if you had an ideal happy family, mum, dad, son and daughter, that you thought was complete, and then you suddenly get hit with the fact that one of the siblings has a life threatening illness?
What if you find out that there is little hope for your daughter’s life, except from the life of a child you have not yet conceived, and never intended to conceive before this illness occurred.
You have a “designer” baby girl and the use of material from the umbilical cord puts the ill daughter into years of remission. The remission then ends, and more and more is needed from the healthy daughter’s body for transplant. How long should parents expect to make the decision for the younger child that she should help her sister in this way?
In this story, which is set in America, the cost to the insurance company for the health care is also an important factor. How far should parents go financially to get the funds needed, if there is a difference of opinion between the hospital doctors and the insurance company?
This would be an emotional enough story if the only plot was a seriously ill daughter who took up most of the parents time, to the detriment of other siblings, but the fact that another daughter endures so much physical and emotional pain through having treatments to help her sister, makes it even more gut wrenching.
I made decisions, five years ago, about how far doctors should go to save my own life, prior to a major operation. I told the consultant the minimum quality of life I wanted, which if he couldn’t achieve for me, he was to let me die, as peacefully as possible. I gave these instructions in the presence of my husband, who agreed that if my requests were unlikely to be met, it would be cruel to keep me alive.
It was bad enough making those decision for myself, especially knowing that my family wanted me to live. Having to make them for a sick child would be worse. Having to make decisions for a child about operations that were to only benefit someone else, but affect her own health, is not something I would want to do, even if I was a qualified medic, but new advances in science means that someone has to make them.
The story is told from the point of view of all main characters involved. Each chapter is headed with the name of the person telling us that part of the story.
Anna starts the story off with reasons why children are born. She believes that she wouldn’t have been conceived if her older sister hadn’t become ill.
Campbell Alexander joins in by page 19 telling of how a thirteen-year-old girl approaches him to help her achieve “medical emancipation”. She no longer wants her parents to put pressure on her to donate body parts to her sister.
Next we hear from Sara the mother, who practised law before being a full time mum to Jesse, Kate and Anna.
This is followed by Brian, who is the dad and a firefighter, telling us part of his story. We hear about his work life as well as his home life.
Anna then tells another chapter. Not surprisingly, she tells a large amount of the story.
Jesse, the oldest of the three children, tells part of the story. Not very much of the story though, as his parents leave him to fend for himself a lot. Brain is particularly uneasy about what effects he thinks the lack of supervision might have on their son.
Julia is Anna’s “guardian ad litem”, who is trained to work with children in a family court, to determine what is in the child’s best interest, and tells us about this role. She is needed to protect Anna from any attempt her parents may make to influence her against suing them. Her mother becomes the attorney representing herself and her husband, when Anna decides to sue them for the right to make decisions about her own body.
Zanne is the career aunt of the children and sister of Sara. She works from Sara’s house, so that she can help with the children, when a medical crisis puts the parents in a position where they couldn’t begin to cope without her.
Kate is too ill most of the time to tell us much of the story herself, but we learn a lot about her from the others.
By reading all the chapters from the viewpoint of the major, well developed, characters, we are given the opportunity to get inside their heads, and I think this is effectively done.
There are lots of interesting sub-plots, as well as the main storyline, which kept me wanting to keep reading for as long as time allowed.
Although this book is more likely to make you cry than laugh, there is also some subtle humour in it. A minor example of this is in the chapter that starts, “No matter how many times you drive to the emergency room, it never becomes routine.” My mind immediately makes a wrong assumption. It takes the next quote a half a page down for me to realised that I am wrong, “I like it better when I get to sit out here . . .” meaning in the waiting area, says Kate, the elder sister.
It may seem that I have told you a lot of the storyline, but I have only touched the surface. There is a lot more for you to discover yourself, with an ending I didn’t expect.
The medical information was presented well, and I learnt a lot about leukaemia, in particular the form Kate’s illness took (acute promyelocytic leukaemia). I had previously known just the biological parts of the body that were talked about, and very little about any form of cancer.
The author Jodi Picoult, who was educated at Harvard, is a wife and mother of three children of her own. She says of herself, “I'm a better mother because I have my writing… and I'm a better writer because of the experiences I've had as a parent that continually remind me how far we are willing to go for the people we love the most.”
I agree that she is very good at understanding the relationships within a family, and passing that knowledge on to readers. I am also impressed by how well she researches the plots she writes about, including this one.
Paperback 448 pages (January 10, 2005)
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
ISBN: 034083546X
List Price: £6.99
Amazon.co.uk Price: £5.59
Summary: Explores ethics of designer babies to help older sibling.
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