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. From readind the novel, I believe My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person.
The novel is very emotional, sad, triumphant, passionate yet heartwrenching and an extremely powerful story. It is ultimately, a story of two sisters, the unbreakable bond they share and how totally entwined they have been all their lives until a crucial decision threatens to tear them apart and ends up changing all the lives forever.
The Fitzgeralds - Brian, a firefighter and avid amateur astronomer, and Sara, a stay-at-home mother and ex-lawyer - have the perfect suburban family, but life changes irreversibly when Kate, now sixteen, is diagnosed at age two with leukemia. She develops what looks like "a line of small blue jewels" down her spine, and her mother knows immediately that she is not seeing normal bruises. The family doctor wants the tests repeated in the hospital hematology/oncology department. There, after a series of painful and invasive procedures, they learn that Kate suffers from "APL, a subgroup of myeloid leukemia. The rate of survival is twenty to thirty percent, if treatment starts immediately." The treatments keep the disease at bay for about five years, until Kate's body explodes with runaway cancer cells. She desperately needs a bone marrow transplant or she will die. Her determined mother, on the advice of the doctor, persuades her husband to try for the "perfectly engineered baby."
Their other child, Jesse, is not a match, but now at thirteen, Anna has always been aware that she was born for a specific purpose, to help fool Kate's body into thinking it’s healthy. Anna obediently steps in.
Everytime Kate is hospitalized so is she, which means Anna can never go away to soccer camp or even to college.
Until now, Anna has never questioned her role in life. But she says that "lately I have been having nightmares, where I’m cut into so many pieces that there isn’t enough of me to be put back together."
Jesse is the wild kid who does drugs and plays with matches, gets arrested for stealing a judge’s car and is generally hopeless. But he is acting out this because he feels he is worthless, unable to help Kate. He calls himself "a lost cause."
After the countless surgeries, transfusions and shots, Anna is now required to give a kidney, which her mother Sara, so intent on saving Kate, doesn’t think is a big deal.
Kidney donation us considered a relatively safe surgery. But the pamphlet that Anna reads explains that "when you donate a kidney, you spend the night before the operation fasting and taking laxatives. You’re given anesthesia, the risks of which can include stroke, heart attack and lung problems. The four-hour surgery isn’t a walk in the park either you have a 1 in 3,000 chance of dying on the operating table, if you don’t, you are hospitalized for four to seven days, although it takes four to six weeks to recover…"
She has had enough. She loves her sister fiercely but she can’t go through with the kidney donation, so she sues her parents for the right to make her own medical decisions.
When you reach the end of the book after following Anna through her journey, you realize that there are no easy or even right answers. There isn’t one person who can be judged for what they think is moral or ethical, or even justifiable.
Sometimes you don’t know what the right thing is but as a mother, as a doctor and even as a sibling, you do what you think is right for you and for everyone else.
Picoult has done an amazing job of presenting the dilemma. She takes this conflicting issue and handles it with compassion, sensitivity and an infinite amount of grace. It may be cliched to say that this is "a must read," but it’s true. I really enjoyed reading this book and would recomend it to anyone in their teens or older.
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