Book #10: My Sister's Keeper

Sometimes, even when I am in the midst of another book that I am absolutely in love with, I can’t help but think ahead to what book I will read next. After reading 776 pages of “The Brothers Karamazov,” I was ready for something that would be really quick and easy to read. Then I saw a commercial for the movie “My Sister’s Keeper,” which is coming to theaters soon and which features Cameron Diaz, Alec Baldwin and Abigail Breslin. Since I have to read books before the movie comes out, whenever possible, I decided to pull my 50-cent thrift store copy out of the book closet and see what this book was all about.

“My Sister’s Keeper” was written by Jodi Picoult, who, if my understanding of her is correct, writes a lot of family melodramas with ethical conflicts at the center. The ethical conflict in this book comes in the shape of Anna, who was conceived in a test tube as a perfect genetic mix for her sister Kate, who had leukemia. As soon as Anna is born, her cord blood goes to her sister, and then as she grows, she has to donate all sorts of things, including bone marrow. When she’s asked to donate a kidney to her ailing sister, though, Anna seeks out a fancy lawyer and files for medical emancipation.

All this is being relayed to us through shifting narrators; everybody related to the court case (except the dying sister) takes turns narrating chapters, though frankly, they all kind of sounded the same, which is especially problematic when you realize you’re trying to read a chapter from the point-of-view of a 13-year-old, and she sounds like she’s 42. It’s hard not to feel emotionally manipulated when all the chapters seem to paint the mom as a huge bitch or if there was any chance to actually fall in love with the dying sister. As it is, both of them are so unsympathetic that you kind of don’t care if they get that kidney or not. I feel like books that have an ethical conflict should actually, you know, have a conflict.

Anna’s lawyer and her guardian ad litem have conflict, though, as it appears they dated for like a week in high school and she’s still hung up on him. Since I read this book knowing Alec Baldwin was playing the part I got terribly confused, because how was I supposed to feel about this woman who hung onto something for like 40 years? But from what I can tell from IMDB, they cut the guardian ad litem from the movie and dispensed with that subplot of ick, so that’s good. How many other subplots of ick did they cut away? I’ll have to wait til the movie comes out on DVD to find out, because I don’t think I’ll see this one in theaters. For one, Cameron Diaz kind of annoys me, and for two, this movie would just be way too sad to pay money to see.

Still, while I may not be painting the rosiest picture of this book, it’s hard to complain about something that only took me a few hours to read. While this is exactly what I needed after “Brothers Karamazov,” I did get worried that the epic nature and intensity of “Brothers Karamazov” had ruined me for fluffy books. I kept waiting for the devil to show up or for some character to recite an epic poem he’d written on the nature of sin, but that never came. Instead, I got a Lifetime television movie. I hope this condition isn’t permanent. I still have a lot of fluffy books in my apartment to read.

By the way, under no circumstances should you go to the Wikipedia page for this book/movie if you don’t like spoilers, because it gives the entire (twist?) ending of the book away, but I did get this little factoid for you: apparently, Dakota and Elle Fanning had signed on for the movie version of this, with Dakota playing the sick sister and Elle playing the reluctant kidney donor sister. But Dakota backed out because she found out she’d have to shave her head to play someone with leukemia, and Elle backed out shortly after. I just find this funny, whether it’s true or not. I like to think that a director said to her, “You can’t just ACT like you have no hair, Dakota,” or something like that.