Blog 3, Quarter 2

SPOILER ALERT!

My book for this quarter is "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult. While I was reading through the question and answer portion with the author at the end of the book, I got to one question and answer that I didn't understand. The question asked about the sad ending to the book and why it was necessary. This was something I had been wondering from the moment I finished. Picoult's answer surprised me in the way that it didn't seem like the most obvious answer. She said "medically, this ending was a realistic scenario for the family[...]". I thought that was kind of ridiculous and even a little angering. The ending of the book was so moving because it was completely unexpected. The wrong Fitzgerald daughter died from nothing medical what-so-ever, but a car accident. I thought a more natural yet still heartbreaking ending would be that Anna would either keep her promise to her sister and keep her own kidney, or give up a kidney just to have Kate die anyway. The possibility that seemed the least medically accurate was Anna dying. Perhaps I would have had less trouble with it if she had died on the operating table as opposed to crushed in a car.

When I got to the part of the book where the dad, Brian, finds Anna crushed against the window of a car, I didn't even realize what had happened. The part of the book described it, "a dog comes wimpering out, I relize that the face pressed up against the other side of the broken window is Anna's." Before the reader even takes that information in and realize what it means, they are reading the next line, "Get them out, I yell, 'get them out now!" That's when I began to realize and the feeling that it gives you is comparable to being knocked over by a swinging bowling ball. I remember having to stop reading for a moment before going back a paragraph and re-reading the descriptions to make sure that I had understood correctly. I was initially so shocked that something as random and unnecessarily depressing as that would have shown itself in an already intense book. This is why Picoult's response to the question ticked me off. It didn't seem like a natural or purposeful way to end the book, although it did serve it's intended purpose of putting everyone who reads it into an all night depression.

Picoult, Jodi. My Sister's Keeper. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.