My Sister’s Keeper: a review
Title: My Sister’s Keeper
Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Pocket Books
Pages: 496
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? If you want to read a book that makes you think about ethics in medicine, and a book that makes you feel the fierce love and loyalty of sisterhood and the sharp pain of loss, read this! It’s for anyone with a beating heart pumping inside of their chest.
Jodi Picoult’s writing is stunning. Each family member is a full-fledged, opinionated and loving person, and family lies at the heart of this novel. Picoult describes people so intimately that readers can reach out and touch the characters, within arm's length of stroking their faces. Maybe when we die, we all become stars.
Anna Fitzgerald was born because her older sister Kate was dying from leukemia. Kate had cancer and required donated stem cells, bone marrow, and now a kidney to stay alive, and Anna was brought into this world for those medical procedures. Nobody asked her if she wanted to save her sister or sought her consent to go under anesthesia. Her parents ushered her into procedures and held her hand because family members support each other in dire times of life and death. Anna’s life revolved around Kate until she shows up at Campbell Alexander’s law office to seek medical emancipation. Her parents need to balance the conflicting medical interests of both their daughters and this rift is tearing the household apart.
This book can be read in so many different lights. It’s a book about cancer. A book about loss. About medical ethics and legality. About being never seeing the future crashing a train wreck, blowing our lives off course. About the very difficult love we have for each other above all else, for our family. A child can forget how much their parents have loved her even before she was born, and will continue to love her long after leaving the world.
Sometimes a little sister grows up in her big sister’s shadows. Before Anna comes into Kate’s life, the world and Kate’s parents only saw Kate. Anna came for a special purpose, to help Kate. But once Anna started growing up, she had her own personality and idiosyncrasies, and she had her own future too, as a stubbornly smart thirteen-year-old. In another ten years, Campbell said she’d be flying fighter jets, painting in Marseille, or oh she totally could be a backup dancer for Arethra Franklin, and ace all of the above. Anna loved Kate in a difficult way, and Kate loved Anna despite all of the desire for attention Anna seems to carry around with her. It’s so, so stupidly easy to forget the love we have for each other in a family until someone is gone forever. Especially as sisters, we take each other for granted, when our soulmate, the person we love the most in the whole entire world and would sacrifice any part of ourselves for, is right there.
There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there’s no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion — that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it’s too late. (My Sister’s Keeper)
P.S. Side note: Abel and Cain. Anna and Kate. Coincidence? A sibling who slain the other in Genesis 4:9. After murdering Abel, the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?
