My Sister's Keeper: Book Vs. Film

Jodi Picoult is a bestselling women's fiction author and with good reason. She has broken the mould of nice and neat literature by exploring taboo subjects with sensitivity and grit. She has explored horrific topics from rape to organ donation and terminal illness. The infamous grey area where things are not clear cut and there are different perspectives to consider.

In My Sister's Keeper, she writes about a family with a child so sick they genetically alter a new baby to be born as a perfect match for its big sister. The cells from newborn Anna are used from the moment of her birth to help her big sister live just a little longer and continue as the years pass. And while all these operations and procedures help Kate live, they are not a cure and she continues to get sick and have treatment for her Leukaemia.

So when Anna goes to a lawyer and asks to sue for the rights to her own body, there are some serious reactions from her family. Her mother cannot understand how she could be so selfish and issue what is tantamount to a death warrant to her big sister while Anna's father tries to understand and be more sympathetic to his daughter's plight. After all, you can't help one child by hurting another - can you?

And this is the moral and ethical dilemma that is explored so beautifully by Picoult throughout the book. As the court case continues, Kate is getting sicker and the already dysfunctional family unit starts to fracture even more under the increasing pressure. The marriage between mum Sarah and dad Brian is close to complete meltdown and tensions are constantly running high. The brother Jesse is all but forgotten amid the chaos and Kate spends a lot of time in a hospital bed, sheltered by her parents. They clearly think they are protecting her but frequently get it wrong or make it worse. Kate gets a brief flickering romance with a fellow patient at the hospital that is so cute and endearing it makes you smile.

The point to the book is that no human is perfect and when faced with a situation as horrific as this, nobody knows how they would react. As with all good Picoult books, there are twists and turns you do not see coming that will leave you stunned and moved to tears on numerous occasions. To tell you any more would ruin the book so I will just say have tissues at the ready and read with an open mind to all perspectives.

5 out of 5 FOBLES - sensitive and daring. Perfect!

Now the film... The film had Abigail Breslin playing Anna and Cameron Diaz playing her mother. Two pieces of great casting that would have worked had the film been any good...but sadly it was not.

I heard when this was due out that something big had been changed but when I saw it at the cinema I was horrified to discover what it was that had been changed. I can't say what without ruining it but it's not a small change I can tell you that and it completely ruined the brilliantly written and darkly poetic ending to the masterpiece novel. It managed to turn a sensitive, sweet and endearing teen romance into something overly raunchy and unnecessary. For the brief moments where I actually enjoyed seeing the relationship between the sisters on the big screen I will give it 1 FOBLE but otherwise it's an overly sentimental destruction of a work of literary genius and deserves nothing more from me.

If it had stuck to the plot of the book, it would have been a classy, clever and endearing weepy but it ended up being an overly sentimental tearjerker playing for cheap tears like a bad comedy plays for the cheap and obvious laughs. I have never been so compelled to complain as I did when I watched this and even found myself going on to the Jodi Picoult website to ask her what the hell she had done in allowing them to destroy her masterpiece. Evidently I was not the first... as Jodi had already written on her page that she had no say in the matter and if you wanted to complain, do it the filmmakers directly.... so I did.

1 out of 5 FOBLES.  Horrific, tacky and obvious.

LE xx

Discuss: what makes a perfect book?

Thanks to my fellow reviewer over at Novelicious, CescaReviews, I have been thinking recently about what makes the perfect book. She recently gave Room by Emma Donoghue a 9.5 out of 10 and I asked her why not a 10? She couldn't say. She speculated that it's the teacher in her which must give an A- never an A.

There is normally that tendency to vear away from giving top marks, whether it's to encourage constant improvement or just because there is a niggling voice that says that a little tweak here or there would have made it perfect. But actually being able to quantify what changes these are is a difficult matter.

So it got me thinking - what are the perfect books? That rare breed of literature that I have read and found impossible to find a single flaw. Well there are the Harry Potter books of course (I make no secret of my love for them!) and then more recently the mindblowing debut of Sister by Rosamund Lupton which had me gripped from start to finish and MORE than passed my tube test. I gave serious consideration to being late for work and staying on the tube just to keep reading.

But for me personally I would have to say that a 10/10 book does something other books don't dare to do. It challenges the beginning-middle-end with a neat and tidy ending and thinks outside the box. Books like My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult) dare to discuss taboo topics with care and conviction and other books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Mark Haddon) choose a perspective not normally explored and explore it with sensitivity and affection.

Then there are those books which are considered great because they have stood the test of time - basically anything by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Even Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham had a timeless quality and apolocalyptic books will never stop being relevant!

So what is your perfect book? What warrants a 10/10?

Over to you... LE xx