Christina Reviews *My Sister's Keeper* by Jodi Picoult

          ***

          My Sister's Keeper is about a girl named Anna Fitzgerald who was genetically engineered to be a perfect match for her dying sister. From the time of her birth, she has been forced to donate parts of her body in the hopes of keeping her sister Kate alive. Kate has leukemia, and every time they fix one part of her, something else seems to go wrong. In fact, I think Kate says this exact thing at one point in the book. The central dilemma occurs when Anna is expected to donate her kidney to her sister who has now experienced renal failure. Anna finds an attorney named Campbell Alexander to plead her case. She wants to be a normal child. She's tired of being her sister's on-call organ donor.

         It's an interesting concept, and a true ethical dilemma. The only thing is that the situations Picoult tends to contrive are often very formulaic. And it's like watching a horror movie and seeing the zipper on the monster. You know you're being manipulated. The ending is the best example of this. I understand why Picoult ended the book the way she did. There was literally no other way to end it. It's hard to end such a story because you've pretty much given away all your tricks before the reader even reads the first page. The reader knows what this book is about the second they read the plot summary, and there's really nothing more they can learn about it by reading the pages within the book because any answers the author can give would be pat or predictable. This is the dilemma with books structured around a moral question. You can learn to care about the characters, you can get a window into what their life is like, but there's no door out, which is a huge problem when the story promises an epiphany that it can't deliver. And that's the prime reason why books should be about characters, not issues. Reading such a book as this is like finding yourself trapped in a claustrophobic little house with no door. So Picoult had to hatchet her way through the wall in order to get the reader out of the story. The shocker ending felt like a cheap shot. A little judiciously placed irony is OK, but deus ex machina (in other words, good old-fashioned plot manipulation) is another story altogether.

          Another problem I had was with the multiple points of views. I understood the story being told from the different povs of the family members. But Campbell's and Julia's subplot was just distracting. I'm sorry, but a high school romance gone wrong is not at all like a family being torn apart by cancer, and nobody can convince me otherwise. The two plotlines are not similar enough to warrant being in the same book together, unless the high school relationship involves at least one cancer patient. Maybe Picoult could have written the subplot with Campbell and Julia in a way that would have made their high school romance relevant (I don't want to completely close the door on that possibility), but the way she did write it, it felt like it was just romantic padding to an already sensationalistic story.

          I didn't think that the relationship between Julia and her twin was necessary either. We didn't need to read about yet another pair of siblings and their idiosyncratic relationship. That plotline with Julia and her sister was just not relevant to the story. Picoult should have just focused on Anna and Kate---there's enough in that relationship to fill an entire book. Seriously, use the extra pages gained by axing the irrelevant sideplots to let us know what Anna and Kate say to each other at night before they go to sleep, and do it long before we get to the ending. Don't have their private conversations be a revelation on the witness stand. I'll get to Picoult's coyness further down, though.

         I don't think Picoult has all of these excess characters in her books because she wants to enhance the story. I think she just has so many cool ideas and is not able to be discriminatory. And important plot points inevitably get pushed aside because she gets so caught up in details that aren't important. She's so in love with all aspects of her little world, and that's good, but she's in love with her fictional world to a fault. Someone really needs to tell her that not everyone who walks into a book deserves a point of view. I'm sure she knows this in her heart, and I understand that putting theory into action can be difficult when it comes to your own characters. Seriously, this is the way it is with her books. "I'm going to give little Pixie a psychiatrist to help her through her day to day problems. But wouldn't it be interesting if the psychiatrist is a stripper by night? I wonder how I can interweave that storyline within the one I'm already writing?" Maybe I'm being unfair. That's just how it comes across to me. And the worst thing is that she never lives up to her end of the bargain by truly getting into these characters' heads. She won't even reveal to us something as simple as why they happen to be walking around town with a service dog, let alone who they are as a person when all the layers of pretension are stripped away. We shouldn't be feeling like the characters are being secretive if we're in their heads.

        It often seems that Picoult is so fixated on metaphors and larger philosophical questions that she forgets that she should be telling the story. And then she gets to the end of the book, needs to cram in all the storytelling she neglected for the past hundreds of pages, and packs it into a witness stand confession.

          OK, I've been critical enough. I really loved the way Picoult showed the ways in which this family was falling apart at the seams. And her prose is usually quite beautiful. I do have to say, however, that some major editing in regards to Campbell, Julia and the ending would have been much appreciated.

        This is my opinion, though.

        I think that Picoult has the potential to write beautiful stories. She should write more books like Songs of the Humpback Whale. Of course, she won't give up the courtroom dramas, though, because that's become her thing. And all of my complaints aside, if ripped from the headline stories work for her, well then, that's what she should be doing. I'm not trying to say otherwise. I just think her novels often leave much to be desired.