26 July 2006

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday #1: My Sister's Keeper

I have some even better house-related news than that our tenant left it really clean, but I'll give a full report tomorrow when I'm not so sweaty and tired.

This spring, I picked up the novel My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. I had never heard of the author or the book, but the premise of the novel--parents intentionally have a third child who is a perfect match/donor for their second child, who has leukemia.

Morally, I'm very interested in issues of fertility treatments, family planning, genetic planning, and whatnot. They strike at the heart of who we are and how we identify ourselves personally and as families, so this novel was really appealing to me for that reason.

Picoult does a good job of representing the characters and their viewpoints with an unflinching but graceful gaze. The organization of the novel, in which each chapter is written from the perspective of one of the main characters, helped me empathize with their widely diverging outlooks.

In the end, the book was not wholly satisfying to me, but it did keep me up late a few nights because I got so absorbed in the story. The narrative is compelling and Picoult gets to the heart of the moral complexities rife in modern medicine in a way that feels insightful rather than educational.

1 comment:

Rev Dr Mom said...

I think Picoult did a wonderful job with the complexities of that family's situation right up until the end, which was just too ....contrived? But I don't know how else it could've ended.

I also thought it was incredibly sad.