Student
Professor
English 514
1 October 2014
Researched Book Review on “My Sister’s Keeper”
In the story “My Sister’s Keeper”, by Jodie Picoult, something very heartwarming yet tragic happens. This story had a huge connection to my life, because it talked about a very similar life I went through when living with someone who had cancer. I chose this novel, because it talks about the connection a family has, and I am very close to my family. I also chose this story because it talks about how a family deals with someone who has cancer, and I can connect to that situation personally. The novel, “My Sister’s Keeper”, by Jodie Picoult talks about a family connection to someone dealing with cancer; the authors of the critiques and I agree that Picoult has very great talent connecting the reader’s experiences with the story being written.
In Los Angeles, the eleven year old Anna Fitzgerald seeks the successful Lawyer Campbell Alexander trying to hire him to earn medical emancipation from her mother Sara that wants Anna to donate her kidney to her sister. She tells the lawyer the story of her family after the discovery that her older sister Kate has had Leukemia; how she was conceived by in vitro fertilization to become a donor; and the medical procedures she has been submitted since she was five years old to donate to her sister. Campbell accepts to work pro bono and the obsessed Sara decides to go to court to force Anna to help her sister. Anna Fitzgerald was conceived via in vitro so that her parents could have a genetic match and donor for their older daughter, Kate who has leukemia. But after years being tested and prodded, Anna decides to take her parents to court herself so that she could be emancipated from them when it comes to anything medical. But her mother refuses to it so the whole thing goes to court. And nearly tears the family apart.
Daisey Marles is an Executive Editor at Publishers Weekly Magazine who loves Picoults novels so well that she even talks to reporter Dick Donahue about the reports of the 2005 book “My Sister’s Keeper.”
The Washington Square Press edition reporting by Dick Donahue of My Sister's Keeper marks week #5 on our trade paper list. Picoult, who was the subject of a February 14 PW Innovators profile, kicked off an extensive media and book-signing tour on March 1. Crowds have been turning out big time, reported publisher Atria, with more than 300 fans thronging her appearance last week at the Freehold, N.J., B&N. Two of the author's previous 11 novels, The Pact and Plain Truth, snared high ratings as TV movies for the Lifetime network, and the current bestseller is under option with Fine Line films. Copies in print of My Sister's Keeper bring that total to 350,000 after two trips back to press. Martha Montello is an associate professor in the department of history and philosophy of medicine and director of the Writing Resource Center in the School of Medicine at the University of Kansas. She also lectures on literature and ethics at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, and co-edited Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. She loved the book so well that she went on to talk about how Picoult writes as a writer.
Picoult, a novelist drawn to such charged topics as teen suicide and statutory rape, takes up this bioethics narrative of parents desperate to save a sick child through the promise of genetic engineering. Conceived in that way, Anna Fitzgerald has served since her birth as the perfectly matched donor for her sister, Kate, who has leukemia, supplying stem cells, bone marrow, and blood whenever needed. Now, though, as her sister's organs begin to fail, the feisty Anna balks when she is expected to
