Choice Book Report 2

I read the book My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.  The main character in this book is Kate Fitzgerald. She was 2 years old when she found out that she had leukemia.    She was beautiful and had long wavy hair and dreamed of becoming a ballerina. She was strong and confident and was excited about all the things she was going to get to do as she got older. Then Kate’s hopes and dreams came crashing down around her when she found out that she had been diagnosed with leukemia.  The leukemia and its treatment left Kate weak, small and fragile.  Her beautiful long wavy hair never grew back the same. When she went places she would wear a scarf to cover up her head when she lost all of her hair.   She was in the hospital all the time, but she did her very best to always stay positive even when she got really sick.   She was at the hospital so much that she didn’t have many friends her own age, so her friends where the nurses who took care of her and her sister Anna.  There were many times when Kate felt very alone and sad.

Kate’s mom desperately wanted her sister Anna to donate a kidney to save Kate, but Anna had undergone countless surgeries, transfusions and shots so that Kate could fight the leukemia and she was tired of being the person that her family relied on to save her sister.  She didn’t want to help Kate anymore.   Kate understood and wasn’t angry with her sister.  She understood the sacrifices that Anna had made for her all these years.  The illness had left their family tired and frustrated.   Every time she didn’t feel good or she had a bruise or she started bleeding she had to go to the hospital.  She would just wait for something bad to happen sometimes.  That’s why she wanted to be a ballerina.  Ballerinas are strong, beautiful and determined, and they had total control over their body and that’s what Kate wanted.

Anna’s decision not to give Kate one of her kidneys and sue her parents tears her family apart.  Then a fatal car crash takes Anna’s life, and they end up giving Kate Anna’s kidney after all. This leaves Kate feeling guilty and believing that it’s all her fault that Anna died.  If she didn’t need Anna’s kidney there wouldn’t have been a law suit and Anna wouldn’t have been on that road at that time.  She still thinks about Anna all the time because Anna was a part of her now that she had her kidney.

Kate is different from most characters because her life hasn’t been normal since she got leukemia.  Her best friend was her sister.  Even though they would fight, Anna was sometimes the only person Kate could talk to.  She really didn’t have any other friends.  In the end, she lost her best friend, her sister, but her sister gave her the biggest gift in the world, her kidney.

I think that there were a lot conflicts in this book. When Kate’s parents find out that she had leukemia, they decide try to have another baby in hopes that the baby would be a bone marrow match for Kate and it would help save her life.  This decision by Kate’s parents was out of love for her, but it left Anna wondering if she was only born to save Kate’s life and it made Anna question who she was and what she wanted out of life. She loved her sister, but it seemed that she was asked to give up so much to keep her sister alive and it seemed like it was never enough.

 Another conflict in the story was when Anna makes the difficult decision to sue her parents because she didn’t want to help Kate anymore and donate her kidney.  If she didn’t help Kate she would probably die, but she wants to have her own life and didn’t want it to be controlled by Kate’s illness anymore.   This decision makes Anna’s relationship with her mom very strained and she ends up going to live somewhere else.  Her mom couldn’t understand Anna’s decision not to help Kate even though Kate understood how Anna felt.  In the end a car crash leaves Anna brain dead and a decision needs to be made on whether or not her parents should take Anna off the life supports and let her go and taking her kidney to be given to Kate.  This leads to another conflict, Kate feeling guilty about Anna’s death.  She feels like it is her fault that Anna died in the car crash and that she gets to live.  Now with the kidney though Kate gets to live a lot longer than anyone expected.

When I think about the situation, it makes me feel really sad.  Both girls love’s each other, but they wanted to have their own lives away from each other.  However, they really needed each other.  They both were really young and had to make hard decisions about their futures.  I am sure that they were both scared and unsure what was best for not only themselves, but there sister as well.  I think that Kate was really brave.  She wanted to let her sister have her own life and not have it controlled by her illness, but at the same time, she wanted to live and have a life of her own without being sick and in the hospital all of the time.