My Sister's Keeper- The Ending

Hey Everyone!

Basic Book Information: 

 Title: My Sister's Keeper

Author: Jodi Picoult 

Number of Pages: 423

This has been one of the toughest books I have ever read. The only book that I have read that the whole story has been fighting leukemia. The book may have had a deathly ending, but the book would have no meaning if it was different. What happens in the book is that Anna dies because she ends up in a car crash and when she is taken to the hospital, the doctors say she is brain dead. When she has no chance of survival, they replace Katie’s lungs with hers and Katie ends up being as healthy as ever. Everybody has a destiny, something they are meant to do. I believe that people make their own destiny's, just not in this story. Anna was created to save her sister, which is something she was meant to do during her life, and which is what she ended up doing. My favorite part of the book is the very ending, where it tells you what has happened after Anna has died. Here it is:

"There should be a statue of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is alright to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass-if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays. For a long time afterward, My father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of her eye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they were traced in constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna would come back to her. She began to look for signs- plants that bloomed to early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in the shape of letters. And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, if she hadn't been at the courthouse signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at that particular intersection and that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the one coming back to haunt her. For a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, unexplainably, I began the long steep climb upward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr.Chance can understand. He things it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy-some contributing delayed effect-but I know better. It is that someone had to go, and Anna took my place. Greif is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer of a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks where my father worked round-the-clock shifts so that he wouldn't have to come to the house that felt too big for us. She still takes me by surprise. Like nearly a year after her death, when my mother came home with a roll of film she'd just developed of my high school graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together,  shoulder to shoulder, tried not to mention as we both looked at all our double-wide grins that there was something missing from the photo. And then, as if we'd conjured her, the last picture was of Anna. It had been that long since we'd used the camera, plain and simple. She was on a beach towel, holding one hand toward the photographer trying to get whoever it is to stop taking pictures of her. My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at Anna until the sunset, until we have memorized everything from the color of her pony tail holder to the pattern of fringe on her bikini. My mother let me have the picture of Anna. But I didn't frame it. I put it into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of those days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps. When I start to feel this way, I go into the bathroom; I lift up my shirt and touch the white lines of my scar. I remember how, at first, I thought the stitches seemed to spell out her name. I think about her kidney working inside me and her blood running through my veins. I take her with me, wherever I go."

It is my favorite quote because I wraps the whole book, and it is just so touching... :) It shows that the way Anna was feeling, that she was created to help her sisters, was not true, her family loved her, just as it shows in the quote. Her family loved her, but they did not make her feel that way just as it is sometimes for all of us. We feel excluded but we know we are loved.

I give this book a 10/10! It is really different from all the other books I have read, in a good way. I recommend this book to everyone that can handle death and grief, but I personally think girls with sisters would find this book really touching. It is filled with empathy as well.