My Sister's Keeper

Literary fiction

First published: 2004
Print length: 423 pagesWashington Square Press, 2009

Description

Thirteen-year-old Anna Fitzgerald was conceived to provide compatible umbilical-cord blood for her older sister, Kate, who has acute leukemia. After years in which Anna’s body has served Kate’s treatment, a recurrence of the disease and kidney failure bring a request for a far more consequential donation. Anna hires lawyer Campbell Alexander and sues her parents for medical emancipation, seeking authority over procedures performed on her. Her mother opposes the petition and represents herself, turning an intimate family crisis into a courtroom dispute over consent, obligation, and parental love. With both sisters’ lives implicated and their neglected brother also unraveling, the novel asks whether protecting one child can justify denying another control of her own body.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Dialogue-driven · Direct

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Earnest · Melancholic · Reflective · Tense

Structure

Braided · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

FamilyFreedomGriefMoralityMortalityParenthood

About Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult writes popular fiction in which private loyalties are tested by public crises. Her novels often place families inside courtrooms, investigations, or medical disputes, then distribute the conflict among people with incompatible claims on the same events. Direct, dialogue-driven prose keeps complicated ethical questions tied to decisions made under pressure. She also uses shifting viewpoints and movement through time to reveal how family history alters the apparent facts of a case. In My Sister’s Keeper, a teenager’s suit for control over her medical treatment turns parental devotion into a dispute about consent and obligation. Nineteen Minutes moves between a school shooting and the years preceding it, connecting the investigation to bullying, friendship, and strained parent-child relationships. Mad Honey alternates a mother’s present-day account with a dead girl’s account of earlier months, joining courtroom suspense to questions of secrecy and how well parents know their children. Picoult’s broader subjects include race, religion, reproductive choice, assisted death, and the death penalty.

Nineteen Minutes Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Washington Square Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9781439157381

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