My Sister's Keeper

I confess. I couldn’t put this book down. It was like reading a crime novel, one of those stories where there are countless coincidences and unbelievable events mixed with high drama and some sort of mystery to puzzle out. But that wasn’t why I read this book. I thought the premise of this book was so interesting: a child conceived for the purpose of providing stem cells/bone marrow for her sister who has leukemia, decides at age 13 that she wants to be medically emancipated. The problem is that Jodi Picoult can’t seem to tell an inherently compelling story like this without burdening it with a thousand other overly dramatic complications, starting with the fact that. Anna isn’t merely conceived, she’s a “designer baby” selected from a number of embryos because she has the right genetic makeup. I won’t give away the other myriad complications; suffice it to say that few, if any, of the characters come away unscathed by coincidence. Which brings up another problem with this book. I value novels that develop strong, multidimensional characters. The characters in this book, however, are two-dimensional, i.e., they have a light and a dark side, but there is little of the subtlety or nuance that make up good, true-to-life characters.

Based on the other Picoult books I’ve read (Plain Truth and Salem Falls), My Sister’s Keeper keeps to a tried and true formula: start with an interesting, important, and relevant social phenomenon and craft a legal thriller around it. In my opinion, this book goes way over the top in the “thriller” category, leaving the essential story and the characters to founder in a mess of improbabilities.