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姓  名 鄭文瑜 學  校 國立台中女子高級中學 年  級 二 年 一 班

 

 

My Sister's Keeper

What kind of parents would be sued by their thirteen-year-old daughter?

Anna Fitzgerald is a specific combination of precious genetic material, she was “created” for a reason── to save her sister, Kate, who suffered from acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). Because of leukemia, Kate needs transplant operation to keep her alive. But unfortunately, there was no matching gene in her family, before Sarah and Brian, Kate’s mother and father, “made” Anna to save Kate’s life. Over the years, Anna has her lymphocytes, bone marrow, granulocytes and peripheral blood stem cells give to Kate, they even want one of her kidneys. The whole thing becomes more and more unbearable, thus, Anna makes an astonishing decision ── sue her parents to seek medical emancipation from them.

I have to confess that I thought Sara is a selfish mother and for the reason I don’t like her behavior at the beginning I started reading this book. I supposed she gave Anna’s birth just to save her beloved daughter, Kate, the one I recognized as their “only daughter”. As for Anna, she is just a gene matching product. To my surprise, as I read more and more through this fantastic masterpiece, I found that although it seems like Sarah loves Kate the most among her three children, but actually we can find her concern to the other two kids in some piece of words that the author arranged in some lines that are easy to neglect.

In my opinion, there is no right or wrong, good or bad answers to this kind of subject in life. Sarah is just trying her best to keep her family in the status she wants, but, maybe she put too much attention on Kate so that she negligently forget to care about Jesse’s and Anna’s feelings. As for Brian, he has noticed there was something strange with Anna, but being a “father” in the family with a daughter has leukemia, perhaps he feels a little insecure so he could not let himself inquire about her sensation.

The issue I want to continue from the above is partiality, not about lawsuit, not about morality, not about anything big enough to freak me out in this book, just about the common phenomenon we can see in normal families. Partial parents make kids upset, seriously. When I was a little child, I always had a feeling that all of my family members like my elder brother better, therefore a great sorrow hit the unconfident child. I started to doubt about the meaning of myself living on this world, and thinking about the question why everybody hates me? Did I do something wrong or something bad? Will they drop some tears for me if I no longer live in the universe?

Time flies, I am not the diffident child anymore. I know my family loves me, they just express their love in implicit ways, at the same time I thought they showed more lovingness to my brother, they actually care about my manners, too. They watch me grow up, sometimes we have arguments, we share our tears and laughter. This is the way we get along with each other. Every family has their own style, I think so does the Fitzgeralds. Anna and Jesse could not feel the equal love from their parents maybe just because they cannot figure out how it works in their family, just as what I did.

The definition of a great book of mine is the book which can make people consider more about life, then have the power to beat all the difficulties down through our lives. Consequently, My Sister’s Keeper is definitely an extraordinary masterwork in my mind. It not only helps me recall all those childhood memories, which make me review my life so far then I can have the chance to identify my misunderstanding toward my family in the past, but assist me in having courage to face all the ups and downs in the future, because I have full confidence with my family that they will stand on my side with their love toward me.