My Sister's Keeper

My Sister's Keeper

Author
Jodi Picoult

Plot summary
My Sister's Keeper is about Anna Fitzgerald, a 13-year-old girl who enlists the help of an attorney, Campbell Alexander, to sue her parents for the rights to her body. Kate, Anna's older sister, suffers from acute promyelocytic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Anna was conceived through in vitro fertilization to be a donor who could save Kate's life. Her parents initially use Anna's umbilical cord blood to treat Kate, and continue to use Anna as a donor for other bodily substances as Kate cycles through remission and relapse over the years. Anna eventually petitions for medical emancipation so that she will be able to make her own decision concerning donating a kidney to Kate, who is experiencing renal failure. Sara, her mother, is an ex-lawyer and decides to represent herself and her husband in the lawsuit. She continually attempts to convince Anna to drop the suit, but Anna refuses.

The guardian ad litem assigned to Anna as her representative is Julia Romano, an old girlfriend of Campbell's. Julia and Campbell met at a private high school, where she was a scholarship student from a poor background and he was a rich kid. They fell in love and enjoyed a relationship until Campbell broke up with her at graduation. Julia never knew the reason but felt it was because of her social class. Although they try to conduct court business professionally, their attraction to one another is apparent. Feeling abandoned again, Julia is frustrated with her relationship with Campbell. He also has a service dog whose purpose he keeps a secret. However, when Campbell has a seizure during Anna's testimony, the purpose of the dog is revealed: he is a seizure dog. Julia then learns that Campbell developed epilepsy after getting into a car accident before their graduation, and broke up with her because he did not want to be a burden. Julia supports him, and they reunite. They eventually marry.

During the trial, Campbell and Sara bring in their witnesses and battle over whether Anna is mature enough for medical emancipation. Julia, who is supposed to deliver a report about who she thinks should win the case, is undecided. While on the witness stand, Anna reveals that Kate told her that she did not want Anna to go through with the transplant, which is why she filed the lawsuit. The judge rules in favor of Anna, and gives Campbell medical power of attorney to help her make any medical decisions until she turns 18.

Soon after being medically emancipated from her parents, Anna is involved in a car accident and left brain dead. With Campbell's permission, her kidneys and other organs are donated to Kate and other patients who might need them. As the book closes, a number of years have passed since Anna's death. Kate explains that she thinks she has survived for so long because someone had to die, and Anna took her place. Whenever she begins to forget her sister, she looks at the scar from her kidney transplant and feels that Anna is with her wherever she goes.

Characters
Anna Fitzgerald
Anna is a 13 year old teenager who is conceived for the purpose of keeping her sick sister alive by donating necessary organs by multiple operations. Eventually, her sister, Kate, asks her to file a lawsuit against donating any of her body parts so that Kate wouldn’t have to go on living in such suffering conditions. Anna is caught between Kate’s order and her parents’ decisions, but won her lawsuit in the end. Sadly, she died just after returning from court and is forever remembered in the memories of her family even after dragging them into so much trouble by suing her parents.

Sara Fitzgerald
Sara is mother to three children, Anna, Kate and Jesse Fitzgerald and wife to Brian Fitzgerald. She is described as a committed mother, but pays more attention to her sick daughter than the rest of her children. She often describes herself as ‘a poor lawyer but a good mother’, but her view is challenged when she has to face Anna’s lawsuit against her and her husband. She demands it ridiculous because she had the idea Anna would do anything to keep Kate alive, like she herself would. She was furious at Anna at first, but realized she still loved her daughter no matter what and was heartbroken when Anna died even though Kate was saved.

Kate Fitzgerald
Kate was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia at the age of two and had been in constant remission and relapse ever since. She was tough battling her disease, but realized she didn’t want to keep on fighting anymore so she asks her sister not to donate her kidney to her. However, Anna dies and Kate is saved, and she feels like she is carrying her very own piece of Anna within her wherever she goes.

Brian Fitzgerald
Husband to Sara Fitzgerald, Brian, too, is torn between her two daughters, but comes to support Anna in the end, and takes her away to live with him temporarily in the fire station where he works. He was the one who extracted Anna from the accident site.

Jesse Fitzgerald
Son to Sara and Brian, Jesse was more than often neglected by his family due to Kate’s disease. Things got worse after Anna filed the lawsuit, and he began to conduct all sorts of juvenal crimes such as smoking pot and arson. Later, he was caught doing arson by his father, who was a fireman.

Campbell Alexander
Campbell is a lawyer who Anna goes to find while filing her lawsuit. He has a dog named Judge who is a service dog, protecting him against epileptic seizures, a disease he had contracted long ago without telling anyone. It was also the main reason he broke up with Julia Romano, his high school sweetheart. Anna believes he took her lawsuit because he was alike her in some ways, one of them being him unable to control over his own body. Was appointed Anna’s medical guardian and involved in the same accident as Anna but survived in the end.

Julia Romano
Julia served as Anna’a guardian ad litem, and was involved in a relationship with Campbell Alexander before. Has a twin sister named Izzy.

Taylor Ambrose
A male teenager who is also diagnosed with leukemia, he meets Kate in the hospital and the two of them became lovebirds immediately. However, Taylor died unexpectedly one morning, causing Kate heart-wrenching sadness.

Personal reflections
This book touched me in many ways, including controversies concerning Anna’s case and severe family ties. It had made me wonder, too, whether Sara or Anna was doing the right thing here. In some ways, I can relate to Anna, a teenager who wants freedom and her own will over her own decisions. However, as a mother, Sara also wants Kate to live, and the only way to do so is to sacrifice her other daughter’s contentment, a way that won’t cost her life, but cause pain and misery to a young child. It is still an argument I have yet to reach its verdict, and this proves how stellar Jodi Picoult writes her masterpieces.

However, it shocked me thoroughly when Anna announced that it was Kate’s decision that Anna didn’t donate a kidney to her. It made me take my eyes off Anna, who was supposedly the main character of the novel, and focus it on Kate instead. Due to the fact that Jodi Picoult didn’t display Kate’s point of view like all the other characters until the very end of the novel, I had never really paid much attention to Kate throughout the book, except treat her as a background drop with a severe disease that had caused all these problems in the first place. But then it occurred to me that Anna wasn’t the only child in the family who was facing gigantic problems, and Kate was suffering just as much too. Heck, even Jesse was neglected by his parents. It can be said that the Fitzgeralds are one screwed-up family.

Having to suffer such a terrible disease at such a young age, and watch her loved ones –like Taylor- leave Kate all of a sudden, made me feel bad. Sympathetic, sure, but also a gut-wrenching sickness that told me life wasn’t fair. How many times had Kate had to watch her own parents waging war against her own sister and blame herself endlessly for the situation they were in? In my opinion, Kate Fitzgerald suffered the most in this novel, not only because of her sickness, but also because of she had to go through by watching her family progress around her, wondering when she would drop dead anytime.

However, I was astonished when Anna died at the end. Well, not exactly, since a friend of mine blurted a spoiler that Anna had passed away earlier on. In fact, the ending was totally different from the one showed in the movie, one that played Kate’s demise. It was such sheer misfortune that Anna had to die right after winning her case. What Kate said in the final chapter got me thinking: only one person had to die, and Anna replaced me. However superstitious that may seem to me, it was also true in some ways.

Verdict? Jodi Picoult is excellent in writing sentimental pieces like this, but just as an extra spoiler, don’t pick up another Picoult book after reading one of hers, because ten pages into a new book might make you bored already, as the contents of every single book she writes are more or less the same.

Rating
9/10