What My Dog Does Journal
New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen perceptivities into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the with regard to emotions riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over humane weakness. Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone innumerable surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, may in some manner 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 genuinely is. But different from most teenagers, she has always been specified in terms of her sister — and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family isolated and have perchance fatal aftermaths 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 rectify to do whatsoever it takes to save a child’s life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth attempting to discover who you in truth 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 disputable real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity.
From Publishers WeeklyThe difficult selections a family must make when a child is diagnosed with a severe sickness are explored with pathos and understanding in this 11th novel by Picoult (Second Glance, etc.). The author, who has taken on such debatable subjects as euthanasia (Mercy), teen suicide (The Pact) and sterilization laws (Second Glance), turns her stare on genetic planning, the probability of creating babies for health intents and the ethical and moral fallout that results. Kate Fitzgerald has a rare form of leukemia. Her sister, Anna, was conceived to provide a donor match for procedures that become progressively invasive. At 13, Anna hires a lawyer so that she may sue her parents for the right to make her own conclusions regarding how her body is used when a kidney transplant is planned. Meanwhile, Jesse, the neglected oldest child of the family, is out setting fires, which his firefighter father, Brian, inevitably puts out. Picoult uses multiple viewpoints to disclose each character’s intents and observations, but she doesn’t manage her transitions as graciously as usual; a series of flashbacks are abrupt. Nor is Sara, the children’s mother, as well devised and three-dimensional as former Picoult protagonists. Her devotion to Kate is understandable, but her finish lack of sympathy for Anna’s predicament until the trial does not ring true, nor may we buy that Sara would dust off her law degree and represent herself in such a perplexed case. Nevertheless, Picoult ably explores a complex subject with bravado and clarity, and comes up with a heart-wrenching, unexpected plot twist at the book’s conclusion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library JournalAdult/High School – Anna was genetically engineered to be a perfective match for her cancer-ridden older sister. Since birth, the 13-year-old has donated platelets, blood, her umbilical cord, and bone marrow as part of her family’s struggle to lengthen Kate’s life. Anna is now being considered as a kidney donor in a last-ditch undertake to save her 16-year-old sister. As this compelling story opens, Anna has hired a lawyer to represent her in a medical emancipation suit to concede her to have control over her own body. Picoult skillfully relates the ensuing drama from the points of view of the parents; Anna; Cambell, the self-absorbed lawyer; Julia, the court-appointed guardian ad litem; and Jesse, the troubled oldest child in the family. Everyone’s quandary is explicated and each of the characters is completely developed. There seems to be no easy answer, and readers are likely to be sympathetic to all sides of the case. This is a real page-turner and frighteningly thought-provoking. The story shows proof of exhaustive exploration and the unexpected twist at the end will surprise almost everyone. The novel does not answer a good deal of questions, but it sure raises a lot of and will have teens thinking in regards to possible answers long after they have finished the book. – Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a section of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist*Starred Review* Expect to be kept up all night by Picoult’s latest novel, but it’s much more than a page-turner; it’s a arousing and attention holding reputation study framed by a complex, gripping story. Thirteen-year-old Anna Fitzgerald walks into the office of lawyer Campbell Alexander and announces she wants to sue her parents for the rights to her own body. Anna was conceived after her older sister, Kate, developed a rare form of leukemia at the age of two, and has donated bone marrow and blood to her sister. Now she has been asked to donate a kidney, and she intends to refuse. Campbell is a jaded young man who notwithstanding decides to take her case pro bono. Anna’s parents are shocked when they learn of her lawsuit, and her mother, a former civil defense attorney, decides to represent them. Anna refuses to budge on her position in spite of the fact that she without doubt or question loves her sister and longs for her family’s happiness. As the gripping court case builds, the story takes a shocking turn. Told in alternating perspectives by the engaging, arousing and attention holding cast of characters, Picoult’s novel grabs the reader from the primary page and never lets go. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, controversial, and honorable book. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most helpful client reviews
211 of 233 humans found the following review helpful.
 Complex issues in a arousing and attention holding story
By Eileen Rieback
Jodi Picoult has masterfully covered yet another disputable topic in her novel “My Sister’s Keeper.” This time, young Kate is diagnosed with a severe form of leukemia. Her parents then have a baby, Anna, who is genetically chosen to be a close donor match for Kate. From her birth onward into her early teens, Anna is called upon to undergo growingly invasive and dangerous procedures to provide blood, bone marrow, and other tissues to sustain her older sister’s life. Now, a kidney is needed, and Anna brings a lawsuit versus her parents, claiming the right to her make own decision regarding what medical procedures may be performed on her. Anna’s mother Sara, an attorney, decides to represent her own daughter Kate at the trial.
There are a great deal of 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 conclusions in regards to Anna’s donor role, and where will have to their loyalties lie? Where is the fine line amongst what is legal and what is ethical in a circumstance 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 aroused picture of a family in turmoil. She adds further and added 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 kinship amidst Anna’s lawyer and her legal guardian.
The narrative switches from reputation to reputation 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 supplying medical support, and the toll that the uninterrupted threat of Kate’s death takes on the family. There are assorted shocking twists to the plot that make the story even more riveting. This is Picoult’s best book yet!
Eileen Rieback
274 of 315 people found the following review helpful.
 Oh, if she’d only stopped twenty pages before it actually ended.
By Robert P. Beveridge
Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper (Washington Square Press, 2004)
Did you ever start out off reading a book with a comparatively high sentiment of it, and then have that opinion spiral downward each 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 aim 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 in regards to whom to read. It all, however, goes downhill from there. Picoult has that rare and unsuitable combining of a taste for melodrama and a fine ear for cliché, and it’s so well-mixed that even the quotes she chooses at the beginnings of divisions are fraught with both. (When you see Milton’s long-trampled quote regarding 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 commence to slip from three-dimensional model into two-dimensional archetype, and either Picoult’s own prejudices, or her attempts to manipulate the reader, begin 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 peculiarly unfeigned in the case of Sara, the mother involved; by page three hundred, I was marveling that no other reputation in the novel had plainly killed her in her sleep to put her out of every one 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 huge 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 sheer bottom of the stack. It’s THAT bad.
I probably must 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 is worthy of any mellowing out. The author pulled a cheap shot. There’s no reason the reviewer shouldn’t as well. It starts out a comparatively decent book. By it is end, it is unbearably awful. (half)
56 of 61 humans found the following review helpful.
A good book that is RUINED by it is horrid ending
By Susan Jones
With the movie in regards to to come out, I thought I will have to review this book to warn people when it comes to it. DON’T BOTHER!
I in truth actually enjoyed the book (even with the rather clunky writing and unsubtle characterizations), and then the ending comes and I get started screaming “What? You’ve gotta be kidding me!” It betrayed the entire premise of the book. It betrayed the characters. It surely betrayed the reader. I will never read another book by this purveyor of pulp, and I refuse to go see the movie unless I am assured beforehand that they have re-written the ending so it makes sense with the rest of the story.
Specifically, and these are spoilers: what I got from the book was that the mother was so determined to save her older daughter, Kate, that she had altogether lost her moorings. Kate was suffering unbearably, and so were her other children and her husband. So Anna, the younger daughter, takes a stand on Kate’s behalf, and says stop, Kate must determine when sufficient is sufficient and this is it. Kate has decisive she has fought through ten years of misery just to take another breath, but that’s not enough. She wants a quality of life that she just can’t have. So she is going to step back, let her sister and her family live their lives, and receive her own lot in life. I thought that was a very moving and interesting perspective.
Then, the end of this stupid book happens. Anna and Kate win their court case. They get to make their own medical decisions. Except they don’t. “Fate” intervenes. Anna is killed in a stupid, cheap car crash. And abruptly her kidney, which was the point of the whole book, is basically up for grabs. So Kate just takes it. Even though the whole point of her reputation allround the book was that she was done with medical procedures, of a sudden the fact that her sister is a dead donor, rather of a utterly more than willing live donor, makes her alter her whole philosophy. And she takes the kidney. And she lives. So, it turns out that the mother was right all along. The girls were just “acting out,” I guess. If they had just accepted one more medical procedure, everything would have been rosy. The whole premise of the book as I understood it — that once in a while adolescents may see things adults can’t, and may earn the right to determine their own fate — was just total b.s. Mommy always knows best. Oh, I cannot get started to express how I hated this conclusion. It made me feel like the entire book was an ugly practical joke.
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