My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

First book completed on my vacation read-a-thon. Well, perhaps it won’t be a read-a-thon considering I want to get out of the house a few times but I need to get some of these done. This is as good a time as any.

This is the second Picoult book I’ve read and all I can say is that the woman loves to make you cry. She must get some perverse pleasure out of it. Or perhaps, she is like Stephen King and feels that if you write about the things you fear the most, it will cause them not to happen, like losing a child.

In both Picoult books I’ve read, there is a death, and grief, and pain, and loss. All the feelings and emotions people go through and hope to never have to. Here, we watch a family struggle with the effects of leukemia. The oldest daughter, Kate, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of two and from that day on, it has become one mother’s personal battle to keep her child alive. One way to do that is to conceive a child that is a close genetic match for your sick child so that they can donate the cord blood cells. That works for a while but down the road, remission turns into relapse. Then blood is needed or bone marrow. Sometimes, that single-minded focus to keep one child alive makes other things fall to the side. Your oldest son turns into a juvenile delinquent. Your other daughter goes to a lawyer to petition the court for medical emancipation from her parents. She doesn’t want to donate her kidney to her sister or at least, she wants to be asked.

This book is filled with all the moral dilemmas and the what ifs and the what would you do questions. You can understand how a parent would want to do anything in their power to help their child, keep that child with them for one more day. But what of those that get hurt in the process? No easy answers. Picoult loves taking a subject like this and exploring the family dynamics that are affected by this predicament.

Ultimately, Picoult books are an interesting read. I’ve found some similarities in the two that I’ve read: courtroom scenes that come with shocking testimony confessions and lawyers with a slightly skewed sense of the world. Mothers that you sometimes don’t really like but you find yourself making allowances for. It makes you wonder what her relationship was like with her own mother.

The best thing about her books: they are great for book clubs. You will not have any problems coming up with things to talk about after reading them.