I should be in bed, but I just finished book #18 of the year, and it's a book that made me go "argh!" out loud very many times and hence I feel like ranting.
The book is "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult, and it's got a very interesting plot. It's about a family with a daughter who has a very rare and severe form of leukemia. The parents decided to have another child to be a donor match for girl with cancer. The younger daughter was actually conceived through IVF, and doctors were able to pick the embryo that was a genetic match for the elder sister.
All through her life, the younger sister has been going through medical treatments to donate cells, blood, and bone marrow for her sister. She loves her sister, but when she is asked to donate a kidney when she is thirteen years old, she decides to hire a lawyer to become medically emancipated from her parents. This means she won't have to donate her kidney if she doesn't want to.
Anyway, even though the writing wasn't amazing, and there were a couple of annoying subplots tacked on (ie a romance between the girl's lawyer and court-appointed guardian), it was quite thought-provoking. Basically, it got me to thinking, how many measures should be taken to keep a person alive? The sister with cancer went through a lot of pain, and it seemed like the family might have taken too many measures to keep her alive. It seemed like the kidney transplant might prolong her life for a year, but then she'd most likely relapse. Is an extra year alive, with most likely more pain and suffering worth it? The mother had all this hope that she'd maybe finally be cured, but it just seemed like it was a lot of pain and suffering for such a long shot.
So the plot was very though-provoking, and there are really no answers to the issues that the book brings up. However, the ending of the book made me throw it across the room. Argh. I won't ruin it here, in case anyone wants to read the book, but really, puh-lease. Bad, bad, bad ending.
I was actually talking about this book to two students today - hooligan-ish boys no less. They had asked me if I like to read so I started telling them about my current book. They thought the book sounded very interesting, and I really can't wait to tell them how it ended. They will be as incensed as I am, I'm sure.
Has anyone read this book? I'm curious to hear other's opinions.
Oh, and there is a movie version coming out in June. Apparently they forgo the tacked-on romantic subplot! So maybe movie versions aren't always worse than the book.
ps This is my 600th blog post. That's probably novel length in itself. Oh, and whenever I do end this blog, I promise the ending won't suck as much as the ending of that book. Grr. It's kept me up past my bedtime!
2 comments:
One book I read not too long ago had s really bad ending. To sumerize the last chapter, turns out, there are aliens. It wouldn't have bothered me if the book was science fiction or something. It was a zombie book. 200 pages of a guy running from zombies only to find out that an alien has caused all the problems. I didn't throw the book across the room, but I can certainly understand you doing it.
I hate endings like that. In fact, I've found that most novels have unsatisfactory endings. I rarely ever read the final chapter of any fiction. Once the central conflict is over, I loose interest.
I tend to read non-fiction instead. History just seems much more compelling to me than "The butler did it," or Asimov's classic "Turns out it was a super-intelligant robot."
haven't read the book, but it sucks that the ending was so terrible. that being said, i've never been able to really get into Jodi Picoult's books.
i'll recommend The Time Traveler's Wife if you haven't read it already. it's a bit fluffy, but it has a pretty nice story.
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