I finished this book last night, very late, and with a very messy mix of feelings about the whole thing. So, I’ll try to make my thoughts a little coherent and such.

I’ll admit I had some doubts about this book. To begin with, the plot sounded too much like the life-time movie of the week and I always end up hating those things. Sorry, but it’s the truth. Frankly, if this book wasn’t in Rory Gilmore’s reading challenge, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. I haven’t seen the film, but my sister told me that it’s completely different from the book, so even if I had, there wasn’t much to compare it with.

The story is pretty complex. It all begins when a thirteen-year-old girl, Anna, goes to a lawyer’s (Campbell Alexander) office and asks him to represent her in a lawsuit against her parents for complete control of her own body. At first, Campbell is a little incredulous, but he ends up accepting the case for free (and for all the publicity it’ll generate). Soon we discover that the reason why Anna is so distressed is the fact that her parents had her with the main purpose of being a donor for her elder sister, Kate, who suffers from an extremely rare and destructive type of leukemia

This book is narrated from a lot of different perspectives, but that wouldn’t have mattered much if each section was told entirely in the same way. But no, the author has some paragraphs in past tense in the middle of a present-tense chapter. The past-tense parts are those in which the characters remember the past, and the present-tense are their thoughts in the current time (when Anna makes her lawsuit). The good thing about this is that we get a pretty complete picture of the whole situation.

I’ll admit I hated Sara with a passion. I get that when one of your kids is sick, you probably focus more attention on them than in the others, that’s okay. But there’s a limit for parental neglect. And Sara crossed it way too many times. Jesse, her oldest kid, is constantly being ignored. And he becomes a freakin’ arsonist (more on that later). Sara’s obnoxious attitude about her daughter had me frustrated through the whole book. When she wasn’t looking after Kate, she was trying to convince Anna to stop with the lawsuit and donate a kidney for her sister. She was constantly saying that she wanted the best for both her daughters, but I just couldn’t buy it.
And on the other hand, there’s Brian. I liked him a lot. He seemed like the kind of person you can depend on and, while he has been mostly focused on Kate, he ends up realizing he has two other kids besides her. He loved Anna and tried to make her happy, not only as a donor for her sister. His pride when Sara’s sister offered to pay for Kate’s treatment was almost funny, but I could get it. He doesn’t like to appear weak. The only moment in which I didn’t like this guy was when he found out his son was an arsonist and didn’t denounce him (more on that later). That’s obstruction of the law or something! Anyway, I still teared up when they thought that Sara was going to die and he was writing an eulogy for her, because if he didn’t do it then, he wasn’t going to be able to write it later.

Then we get to Anna. I felt sorry for her. She was clearly thorn apart throughout the whole book. As a teen, she was trying to get an identity, something that didn’t involve being Kate’s donor and only that. She knew how and why she was conceived, and I can imagine how terrible it must feel to think of one self’s as basically a bunch of extra parts that are meant for another person. Horrible. I liked her sense of humour and how she reacted to everything. The big plot twist

that Kate was the one who suggested the lawsuit

made me like her even more. I read somewhere that letting someone go is the ultimate proof of love. I think Anna loved her sister more than Sara loved her daughter.

Campbell Alexander is the lawyer that takes Anna’s case. At first he does it because it’s an easy case, with chances of getting lots of publicity, and that can’t hurt him. He has a service dog and whenever he’s asked about it, he answers with funny made up stuff, that’s obviously false.

He ends up having an epileptic seizure in the middle of Anna’s hearing, thus revealing the truth about him

. He’s a rich kid, used to having the very best and so on, but he also appears to be very lonely. He also ends up bonding with Anna in a way that felt very sweet. They shared a weird sense of humour, and could get each other.
There’s also Julia Romano, the guardian ad litem appointed by the court to overlook Anna’s family and give advice about whether or not the girl can take her own medical decisions. She’s someone from Campbell’s past: they went to school together (a private school in which she had a scholarship) and he was the first one to have sex with her. But they broke up without many explanations from Campbell’s side (It was due to the accident that provoked his epilepsy), and she has spent ever since then asking what is wrong with her and failing at relationships.

To say the truth, I felt that Campbell and Julia’s subplot didn’t add anything to the book. If it wasn’t there, everything would’ve been mostly the same and that. They were very sweet together, but also very useless.

Jesse, Kate and Anna’s brother, got a lot of my compassion. At least Anna got a little bit of attention because she was the donor, but nobody really cared about him. That he did drugs, drank and burnt stuff was almost a response. I’m not justifying him or anything, he was pretty unstable, but he was basically left to thrive on his own since he was a kid. There’s a moment in which Sara cancels Jesse’s visit to the dentist because she doesn’t feel like going. Yes, she’s tired of taking care of Kate’s health, but that doesn’t allow her to ditch the other kid’s health as well. I didn’t like that Brian kept silent about his son being an arsonist. He deserved to spend at least a few months in jail.

And then there’s Kate. Most of what we learn about her is from the eyes of her family. We see her as brave girl who’s fighting an awful disease, as the big sister Anna admires and loves, as the friend Jesse doesn’t want to lose, as daddy’s girl. I loved her story with Taylor (the jokes, the sarcasm) and her own trying to be a teenager even if she’s sick and all that. She was quite a mystery, and a great character.

But let’s talk about the ending, shall we?

When the judge ends up ruling in favour of Anna, but appoints Campbell to be her medical attorney. As the two of them are getting back home, they get hit by a truck. Brian is the on-call firefighter and he gets his daughter out of the car, just to find out that she’s not going to make it. After she’s declared brain-dead, they are asked if they want to donate Anna’s organs. Campbell, who is the one in charge of her medical decisions, tells them to go ahead, and Kate gets the transplant.
The book ends with Kate in 2010 reflecting on what happened. She’s been in remission for six years, and she’s working with children. She still misses her sister and, in a way, has become her sister’s keeper. That part was okay.

But I still feel the ending was too rushed. In three pages we get that Jesse has become a policeman, that Brian drowned his sorrows in alcohol after Anna died, but came out of it, and that Sara is still recovering. Very fast, and very perfect, in a way. Everything ended up being okay for the family, except that poor Anna is dead. For that reason, I just couldn’t like the ending. It would have been a lot better if the story had ended up with the family struggling to make it work, instead of after the whole struggle.

Overall, a good and quick read. Not excellent, but decent enough.