My Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult, 2007
Young adult PhilosophyPsychologyContemporary fiction
An exploration of ethics and sacrifice when a family's life is determined by a biological lottery. A tense, intimate family story told in shifting voices, with moral questions pressing in and a defiant teenage narrator at its center.
Feels like unease, defiance and melancholy. About identity, family and morality.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy family dramas that weigh ethical dilemmas from several viewpoints. One scene includes a hard slap, and the story can feel emotionally heavy and morally uncomfortable.
Why read it
It lets you sit with hard questions about obligation and love without offering easy answers, and the multiple voices keep the argument alive.
A page from the book
A sudden crack in the veneer of politeness. A shock you didn't see coming.
My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snapbackward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered. Jodi Picoult.The novel explores complex ethical dilemmas surrounding medical decisions, often utilizing a multi-perspective narrative structure to challenge the reader's own assumptions.
Books that feel like this
More by Jodi Picoult
Mad Honey
Jodi Picoult, 2022
A beekeeper, her hockey-captain son, and the charge that splits a small New Hampshire town — and everything a mother will not let herself see.
The Pact
Jodi Picoult, 1998
A small-town Maine novel about first love so certain it becomes dangerous, and the families who have to live with it.
The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult, 2013
Jodi Picoult braids a modern moral dilemma with a historical story of survival, asking who gets to tell—and be believed about—the past.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is My Sister's Keeper for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy family dramas that weigh ethical dilemmas from several viewpoints. One scene includes a hard slap, and the story can feel emotionally heavy and morally uncomfortable.
- What is My Sister's Keeper like?
- A tense, intimate family story told in shifting voices, with moral questions pressing in and a defiant teenage narrator at its center. Feels like unease, defiance and melancholy. About identity, family and morality.
- What should I read after My Sister's Keeper?
- If you liked My Sister's Keeper, try Go Set a Watchman (Harper Lee), Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) and Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes).
A taste of the feed
The day a parent stops being a god and becomes a person.
As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ’em like all of us.
Go Set a Watchman · Harper Lee
The grip that keeps us from dissolving into the storm.
As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.
Flowers for Algernon · Daniel Keyes
The generosity of people who have just done something unforgivable.
So Tess was going to be allowed to kick and scratch as much as she wanted. They were just going to sit there and take it for as long as it took. They weren’t going to fight back. Will and Felicity were fundamentally good. She knew this. They were good people, and that’s why they were going to be so nice about this, so understanding and accepting of Tess’s rage, so that in the end Tess would be the bad person, not them. They hadn’t actually slept together, they hadn’t betrayed her. They’d fallen in love! It wasn’t an ordinary grubby little affair. It was fate. Predestined. Nobody could think that badly of them.
The Husband's Secret · Liane Moriarty
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