My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Rating: ★★★★★
Jodi Picoult explained exactly what it feels like to grow up with a sibling who is dying of cancer. I was five years old when my older brother, Jacob, lost his battle with Osteosarcoma. Growing up with a sick sibling was like being invisible, and that's not my brothers fault or my parents fault, in fact, I was pretty lucky. My family had a lot of support and a lot of people who loved us. I was always in the care of someone who gave me their time and attention, but the fact remains: my brothers problems were always bigger than mine. My parents gave him more time and attention because he wasn't going to be around much longer, and that's okay.
The byproduct of all this is that I felt invisible. After my brother died and my sister was born I acted out to get attention, maybe not from my parents specifically, but just from anyone. I wanted big problems because I wanted my problems to be worth noticing. It seems ridiculous, but Picoult wrote a book that affirmed my belief that my experience was not unusual.
In this sense I actually related to Jesse more than Anna, because I was not in any way responsible for keeping my brother alive (thank God... that is too heavy a responsible for child). But, I was helpless, like Jesse. Jesse tells a story about decorating the family Christmas tree while his parents and Kate and Anna were at the hospital, but when they came home no one even noticed. Jesse tried for a long time to make things better, but no one ever acknowledged his effort so at some point he just stopped trying. And that's how selfish people are born. If no one cares about you caring about them then why bother?
Anna said, "Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off" (387). That sentence is so unbelievably true. Jacob was hilarious, and some of my favorite memories are of him laughing at his own sickness.
See below for more of my favorite quotes.
Favorite Quotes:
"A photo says, You were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were important to me that I put down everything else to come watch." (130)
"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?" (138)
"Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours" (250).
"We are not the first parents to lose a child. But we are the first parents to lose our child. And that makes all the difference" (271).
"afterward, she went inside and stared at her son, who wasn't her son anymore. That she sat for five whole hours, sure he was going to wake up." (321).
"Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the house, down to the last shrunken raisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat down to watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh. Immediately I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse, sitting beside me on the couch, who said "She would have thought it was funny, too."
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The plot twist the Jesse was the arsonist was genius! Also, when he was giving Kate blood and his mom didn't even know!! AHHHHHH
The big question: how did I feel about the ending? I don't know. I'm definitely conflicted about the ending. I think killing off Anna almost negated her entire struggle throughout the book, but it was quite the plot twist. I do wish we got a chapter from Brian and Jesse as well after Anna died. I did like the big final chapter from Kate's perspective, but I wanted to know how Jesse was dealing with all this. It was like Picoult just ditched him after his very short chapter in the rain on the football field.
