I had never read a novel by Jodi Picoult before. I chose to read this one because it won the Abraham Lincoln Award. And now I have read all of the Lincoln Award Winners (fiction)! Yea! The things that bring relief if not happiness.
I hadn’t exactly gotten excited to read it. But it was a true page turner. I couldn’t put it down. I understand that there is a movie as well. It looks like Diaz and Breslin take the starring roles? Perhaps I’ll have to order it.
There are just those books that seem made for a TV movie or perhaps Hallmark is a better choice. And this book had the same feeling – guaranteed to push all of your emotional buttons. I should have known I was going to need tissues. I don’t know why I thought I would be immune.
The youngest character in the book and the protagonist, Anna Fitzgerald, is a mature thirteen-year-old girl and this is why I will recommend this book to girls from Junior High on. Children like to read about kids that are older than themselves. It gives them a glimpse into their future. And girls tend to be more mature.
But I will warn that there are also adult characters, young and old, and this novel was written with an adult audience in mind. Cursing is used, but not excessively, but rather appropriately if there is such a thing. I think there are still a few of us that need a Mt. Everest to collapse upon us to elicit a “darn”. The oldest, sibling, Jesse, has run amuck, he uses drugs, makes his own moonshine, steals motor vehicles, and is proudest of his arsonist tendencies. There is sex, but not descriptive and certainly not graphic, more implied. Finally, there is a lesbian character, but her seven-year relationship has just ended and she only makes a few angry appearances. These are the red flags of the Children’s Librarian. i.e. If you don’t point them out, a patron will.
Anna is the younger sister of Kate Fitzgerald who was diagnosed at two-years of age with a rare form of leukemia – acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). “Only about twelve hundred people a year are diagnosed with it. The rate of survival for APL patients is twenty to thirty percent, if treatment starts immediately.” Kate’s best chance for survival is for a related, genetic match donor, but her brother is not a perfect match. A doctor suggests that Kate’s parents consider more siblings for Kate and that is the first inkling in their minds of an Anna.
Anna is a designer baby. She is not the first to be designed and certainly not created for something so shallow as to be tall or smart or pretty. No Anna is an embryo picked from among several because she had the six necessary proteins to be a match for Kate. She is a donor from the moment she is born. Kate receives her cord blood. Then she receives her lymphocytes, not once, but three times. Next she receives Anna’s bone marrow. What is at stake now, is Anna’s kidney for Kate’s life.
Anna hires a lawyer to help her become medically emancipated from her parents. She is tired of being invisible. She is tired of being important because she is Kate’s donor. She wants to be asked and treated as a human being. But of course there is more to the story. Anna doesn’t want to lose her sister any more than anyone else in the family. But she doesn’t want to lose herself in the process of saving her sister. No one seems to have the right answer, the moral answer, the ethical answer. The adults are as dumbfounded as the children. Anna doesn’t know if she wants to fight and if she chooses to fight, she isn’t sure she wants to win.
The book is told in multiple voices and they worked very well and convincingly. The children’s mother, Sarah, provides a unique voice as she speaks from the past. The day Kate was diagnosed. The days she almost died. The day Anna was born. The rest of the characters including all of the siblings, their father, the lawyer and the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna, speak from the present as they interact with each other and add their own insight to the case.
The book would be well worth a second read. There are so many ties and feelings and clichés that speak to the final decision. Sometimes we have our own opinions and ideas until they are applied to someone else and then we lose our convictions to the wind.
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