An attempt on reviewing books

"If you use one of your children to save the life of another, are you being a
good mother - or a very bad one?"

I had to admit it, even before reaching the last word that marks the ending, I had started to feel like crying. Like her other book Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper holds a plot that grips it's readers so tight you could practically loose yourself in time, and words, for that matter. It's always the last few pages that changes everything. You will think you know, and will be able to guess, what will eventually turn out, only to find that bit by bit the story goes out of hand, into Picoults brilliantly formed net.

Now and then, she lets in bits and pieces of information, things that readers may or may not notice but will come to realization of the point of it being mentioned upon flipping till the last page. But of course, I won't say her writing is flawless, because I believe no one else is nor can ever be. And besides, the likability of a book is solely based on personal preference, just like wine. I would say this is a good book, a really good one in fact, although there were parts I'd thought were excesses that serve no purpose in telling the story.

Also, I like how she always ends her paragraphs and chapters sort of hanging but actually isn't. The only possible explanation would be her intention of trigerring thoughts, as if forcing readers to form their own thinking. If only, what would happen if only? So what now? Would you have done the same thing? Did she do it because she thinks it's right or because she needed to make the situation right?

Another tick in my to-read list. This book is good but personally I think Picoult needs to be careful of producing duplications because all through the book, I never stopped seeing shadows of Nineteen Minutes peeping out behind words (or actually it's the other way around since My Sister's Keeper was written before it), even though both stories are not related nor were they similar. But the thing that doesn't change is the pathway she had formed for her readers, and how she had guided them with the same old gesture and emotions, till the end.

Now about the book, I felt sorry for Anna, the same way I felt sorry for Delia in Vanishing Acts, and Peter in Nineteen Minutes. They were all victims, but people fail to see that, because they were too blind to pay attention to what goes on behind what plays right before their eyes. In her stories, no one wins and no one looses. Things doesn't always turn out the way the readers want, because they are out of the reader's imagination or in other words, the assumption of what Picoult is capable of: re-manipulating the plot. Instead, it always twists itself into something it ought to be, for the good of all. Giving her readers a satisfying but not another oh-how-I-wish-it-was-like-that ending shows that she is indeed a very talented writer.