عــــــالــــــيــــــة

A couple of days ago, I finished reading the book “My Sister’s Keeper”. A number of my friends had recommended it to me including Pinkish our fellow blogger. I must say the book’s name didn’t really catch my attention, but the small writing that was writing underneath the big title did:

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

The story is about a 13-year-old girl called Anna, who’s went through multiple surgeries, transfusions, & injections to save her severely ill sister, Kate, who suffers from APL ” Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia “, that’s a very rare subgroup of leukemia, which is basically blood cancer. But when it gets to the point that Anna should donate one of her kidneys to Kate, that’s when everything started to come apart. Anna makes the decision to sue her parents for the rights to her own body. Although in her own words she admits that her parents made her or conceived her for this particular purpose- that is to Save Kate- she starts questioning that what if Kate wasn’t sick at all, would she be born?:

” I’m telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they’d conclude that most people have children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn’t one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren’t very flattering.

On the other hand, I was born for a very specific purpose. I wasn’t the result of a cheap bottle of wine or a full moon or the heat of the moment. I was born because a scientist managed to hook up my mother’s eggs and my father’s sperm to create a specific combination of precious genetic material. In fact, when Jesse told me how babies get made and I, the great disbeliever, decided to ask my parents the truth, I got more than I bargained for. They sat me down and told me all the usual stuff, of course- but they also explained that they chose little embryonic me, specifically, because I could save my sister, Kate. ‘ We loved you even more,’ my mother made sure to say, ‘because we knew what exactly we were getting.’

It made me wonder, though, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy. Chances are, I’d still be floating up in Heaven or wherever, waiting to be attached to a body to spend some time on earth. Certainly I would not be part of this family. See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. But once it’s gone, so are you. “

The story if filled with many complex emotions, of abandonment, loneliness, confusion, and the feeling as though you have to choose one of two choices, knowing that the first would kill you and the other would cripple you for good. And I admit I did have a couple of teary eyed moments while reading it. It also mentions the conflict between morals & ethics, right & wrong when it comes to making a decision that may change your life, which made me think a lot of my life too.

In this story the author shows us the moment in the eyes of each character individually, but still, you can’t help yourself from taking sides. To me I was on Anna’s side the whole time. Even though her mother kept saying over & over that she really loved her. To me favoring a child over another for any reason, big or small, is just unfair.

I really enjoyed reading this story, especially that the ending wasn’t quite what I expected it to be. Even though there were some parts where there was some talk about how the world began or was created in the eyes of the Greek, and how Anna thought it really happened, which kind of conflicts with what our Holy Quran says. But it’s not a major topic in it, so I kind of started skipping those parts, because to be honest, they didn’t make any sense to me and made me uncomfortable.

I strongly recommend this novel if you’re into tragic stories that might change the way you look at things and your life after the last page.

Pleasant reading everyone