Shirley Tipsy

Book Review: My Sisters Keeper by Jodi Picoult

I have been meaning to read this book for months, but everytime I picked it up I could sense that it was going to break my heart, so I put it back on the shelf in place of something more lighthearted and easy on my heart. Last month I went to the movies with my BFF and we saw a preview for the My Sisters Keeper movie which was based off of the book and I cried my eyes out. Yes, you read that right, I cried over a two minute long movie trailer. I knew right then that I needed to get over my silly hang-ups and read the damned book before the movie came out (I have a policy about not reading the book version AFTER a movie comes out.) Anyway, I finally read the book and can I just say, it was even more heart breaking than I had anticipated.

Here you have this 13 year old girl, Anna, who was born and raised to be a savior for her sister Kate who has a very rare type of Leukemia. Anna starts donating parts of herself from the moment she makes her debut in the world via the blood from her umbilical cord. As the years go on, Anna donates everything from blood to platelettes to bone marrow and the list goes on and on. That is, until she files a lawsuit to sue her parents for medical emancipation so that she can start making her own decisions about what she will and will not do with her body.

This story is beautiful and it’s hard, it makes you angry and then makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the stomach by greif that feels so real to you, you’d swear your own children were experiencing it. I literally had to get up and leave the room while reading this book so that I could sob in privacy. 

If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it. In any event, you should at least watch the trailer and see for yourself what makes this story so special.