English Blog

Book Review - 'An Abundance of Katherines'

For the second book that I would review this year, I chose 'An Abundance of Katherines', by John Green. I had previously read 'The Fault In Our Stars', 'Paper Towns' and 'Looking For Alaska', all by John Green, and I really enjoyed all of them apart from 'Looking For Alaska', which I felt had potential however. Bearing this in mind, I was really looking forward to reading the book, as I was eager to see if the authors writing had developed in his second book.
  'An Abundance of Katherines' is about a child prodigy named Colin who has a pattern of dating girls named Katherine...and getting dumped by them!
 

Book Review - 'My Sister's Keeper'

I chose to read 'My Sister's Keeper', by Jodi Picoult, as I had heard many people talking about the book. I didn't know what the book was about, but I was aware of its popularity and I knew that a movie had been made based on the book. I was eager to find out for myself what the book is like, and once I had read the blurb, I was hooked!
  This book is about Kate, a girl who is terminally ill with cancer. She has a rare type of cancer - APL, and wasn't expected to live past the age of 3. Her sister Anna, who is deliberately conceived as a genetic match, donates blood, platelets, bone marrow and more to keep Kate alive. However, when Anna is expected to donate a kidney to her dying sister, she decides to sue her parents for the rights to her own body. As a 13 year-old child, this is an extremely brave and controversial decision, as her sister will die if she does not donate the kidney.
  The book deals with Anna's moral struggle about her decision to stop medically assisting her sister, and how the rest of her family deal with Kate's sickness and the law suit at the same time.
  The story is told from several different perspectives - that of Anna, her older brother Jesse, her mother, her father, her lawyer Campbell Alexander, and her lawyer's love interest. This makes the story much more well rounded, and I found it allowed me to really see how illness and family conflict affects each individual. It also showed how complicated a situation like this can be, where many different moral opinions are present and valid. This makes the decision as to whether Anna should be expected to continue donating parts of her body to Kate to keep her alive, or not, virtually impossible to make in a morally upright manner from all perspectives.
  'My Sister's Keeper' gives an insight into what the lives of people living with terminal illness is like - the book often reverts back to when the children were younger, often times when Kate was particularly ill, and this shows how traumatizing and harrowing a life it can be for those affected. It also shows how having a very sick sibling can really damage a person, and severely affect how they are brought up. It brings the phenomenon of sickness and death down to a really human level, and allows the reader to get a window view of a world that so many people are trapped in.
  Overall I have thoroughly enjoyed this book - it is extremely emotional and very intimate to the characters, and a very well written book. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is looking for a good read.