Book #32: My Sister's Keeper

Title: My Sister's Keeper


Author: Jodi Picoult


This week in Newsweek, there's an article about "helicopter" parents, aka parents who hover over their children. Lydia Meadows, in A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity definitely qualifies as a helicopter parent, fussing over every slumber party invitation and school essay. But I'd also say that Sara Fitzgerald in My Sister's Keeper hovers to a degree that makes her children uncomfortable.


Of course, Sara has more justification for her hovering than Lydia does. Sara's daughter, Kate, who is sixteen when the novel opens, has been fighting APL, a particularly deadly form of leukemia, for fourteen years (most people with this type of leukemia live about a year after diagnosis). When Kate is diagnosed, keeping her alive becomes the driving ambition of Sara's life. A year after the diagnosis, Sara gives birth to Anna, conceived through IVF to be a donor-match for her older sister. Over the next thirteen years, Anna donates cord blood, regular blood, leukocyctes, bone marrow and other things I don't remember. When it becomes evident that Kate will only surive if she gets a new kidney, Sara automatically expects Anna to give up her spare. The only problem? Anna doesn't want to.


My Sister's Keeper raises all sorts of interesting issues for parents. When the best course of action for one child is the worst course of action for your other child, what do you do? Is it possible to work too hard to keep a child alive? What happens when one child is sick and the other two get lost in the shuffle? It's a hard book to read from a parent's perspective, an interesting read from a medical perspective, and all in all, an engrossing, quick read.


--originally published 5/21/06