Monday, January 02, 2006
My Sister's Keeper
If you are looking for the Mr. Weber/Forgetful Jones episode, either scroll down to the previous post, or click here. :-) Otherwise, keep reading.
Over the break, I started reading for our school's "non-professional" book club. That is, the books are not considered professional reading. That needed to be explained because I didn't want you to imagine a bunch of teachers having a club to sit around acting all non-professional. Yeah.
Anyway, previously, we have read and discussed Winter in Kandahar and Glass Castle. Now, I'm not a good reader. I mean, I read VERY slowly, with all of the plodding and contemplation of a mathematician studying a text. Yes, even novels are read this way by me. Sorry to admit it. And I was raised by a book-devouring librarian. She keeps encouraging me to learn to skim. Skimming is a concept I don't get.
About a year and a half ago I read the book, Wicked. After reading it, I loaned my copy of it to a friend, and after a few weeks asked her, "Do you like it!!??" She looked at me funny, and said, "You can't like that book!" But she was *into it*, and we chatted about it. Yes, she's right ... Wicked is a book that you just can not "like". It's a bit on the disturbing side.
Well, I feel the same way about My Sister's Keeper. I started the book at my mom's house on Christmas Eve. I was at Mom's for about a week, and then was in Ohio for a wedding and spent two nights at a hotel. All of this adds up to LOTS of reading time ... at Mom's because that's what's done in our family, sitting around reading. And in the hotel, well, obviously because what else is there to do in Springfield, Ohio? Needless to say, this gal who could spend months finishing a Dr. Suess book finished My Sister's Keeper yesterday.
And I can NOT say that I *liked* it. But it was a fabulous book. I don't want to say much about it ... don't want to give anything away. But here's a hook for you. The premise is that there is this normal, American, middle-class family. Their daughter, Kate, is found to have leukemia. A very deadly form of leukemia. They try some different treatments, but are having trouble finding a donor for things like bone marrow, etc. So, they genetically engineer a younger sister to be a perfect genetic match for the older daughter. After thirteen years of donating stem cells, blood, bone marrow, etc. for her sister, Anna is required to donate a kidney. She decides to hire a lawyer and fight to have herself medically emancipated.
I have found that just describing the premise to friends is enough to spark huge conversations. One friend keeps coming back to ask me more questions whenever I see him. I told him that he just needs to read the book for himself. And that's really what I recommend for you. I don't think that you'll *like* the book. But it's good ... and it's well-written (each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person in the story: the donor sister, the mom, the dad, the lawyer, the brother who didn't match as a potential donor, and so on). You'll cry. And I think you might just agree ... there really is no good answer to the question.
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