WEEK 24

 Key stage 3 Read of the week

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Summary:

New York Times best-selling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen insights into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the emotionally riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over human weakness.

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age 13 she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate—a life and a role that she has never challenged ... until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister—and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart or let others lead you? Once again, in My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult tackles a controversial real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity.

Excerpt from My Sister's Keeper:

The owner puts a loop up to his eye, which makes it seem almost normal size. "I'll give you twenty."

"Dollars?"

"No, pesos. What did you think?"

"It's worth five times that!" I'm guessing.

The owner shrugs. "I'm not the one who needs the money."

I pick up the locket, resigned to sealing the deal, and the strangest thing happens -- my hand, it just clamps shut like the Jaws of Life. My face goes red with the effort to peel apart my fingers. It takes what seems like an hour for that locket to spill into the owner's outstretched palm. His eyes stay on my face, softer now. "Tell them you lost it," he offers, advice tossed in for free.


If Mr. Webster had decided to put the word freak in his dictionary, Anna Fitzgerald would be the best definition he could give. It's more than just the way I look: refugee-skinny with absolutely no chest to speak of, hair the color of dirt, connect-the-dot freckles on my cheeks that, let me tell you, do not fade with lemon juice or sunscreen or even, sadly, sandpaper. No, God was obviously in some kind of mood on my birthday, because he added to this fabulous physical combination the bigger picture -- the household into which I was born.

My parents tried to make things normal, but that's a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be honest, neither were Kate and Jesse. I guess maybe my brother had his moment in the sun for the four years he was alive before Kate got diagnosed, but ever since then, we've been too busy looking over our shoulders to run headlong into growing up. You know how most little kids think they're like cartoon characters -- if an anvil drops on their heads they can peel themselves off the sidewalk and keep going? Well, I never once believed that. How could I, when we practically set a place for Death at the dinner table?

Kate has acute promyelocytic leukemia. Actually, that's not quite true -- right now she doesn't have it, but it's hibernating under her skin like a bear, until it decides to roar again. She was diagnosed when she was two; she's sixteen now. Molecular relapse and granulocyte and portacath -- these words are part of my vocabulary, even though I'll never find them on any SAT. I'm an allogeneic donor -- a perfect sibling match. When Kate needs leukocytes or stem cells or bone marrow to fool her body into thinking it's healthy, I'm the one who provides them. Nearly every time Kate's hospitalized, I wind up there, too.

None of which means anything, except that you shouldn't believe what you hear about me, least of all that which I tell you myself.

As I am coming up the stairs, my mother comes out of her room wearing another ball gown. "Ah," she says, turning her back to me. "Just the girl I wanted to see."

I zip it up and watch her twirl. My mother could be beautiful, if she were parachuted into someone else's life. She has long dark hair and the fine collarbones of a princess, but the corners of her mouth turn down, like she's swallowed bitter news. She doesn't have much free time, since a calendar is something that can change drastically if my sister develops a bruise or a nosebleed, but what she does have she spends at Bluefly.com, ordering ridiculously fancy evening dresses for places she is never going to go. "What do you think?" she asks.

The gown is all the colors of a sunset, and made out of material that swishes when she moves. It's strapless, what a star might wear sashaying down a red carpet -- totally not the dress code for a suburban house in Upper Darby, RI. My mother twists her hair into a knot and holds it in place. On her bed are three other dresses -- one slinky and black, one bugle-beaded, one that seems impossibly small. "You look..."

Tired. The word bubbles right under my lips.

Key Stage 4/5 READ OF THE WEEK

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

Summary:

Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.

From the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents comes this tale of courage and sisterhood set in the Dominican Republic during the rise of the Trujillo dictatorship. 

Excerpt from In the Time of the Butterflies

Chapter One

Dedi

1994
and
circa 1943

She is plucking her bird of paradise of its dead branches, leaning around the plant every time she hears a car. The woman will never find the old house behind the hedge of towering hibiscus at the bend of the dirt road. Not a gringa dominicana in a rented car with a road map asking for street names! Dedi had taken the call over at the little museum this morning.

Could the woman please come over and talk to Dedi about the Mirabal sisters? She is originally from here but has lived many years in the States, for which she is sorry since her Spanish is not so good. The Mirabal sisters are not known there, for which she is also sorry for it is a crime that they should be forgotten, these unsung heroines of the underground, et cetera.

Oh dear, another one. Now after thirty-four years, the commemorations and interviews and presentations of posthumous honors have almost stopped, so that for months at a time Dedi is able to take up her own life again. But she's long since resigned herself to Novembers. Every year as the 25th rolls around, the television crews drive up. There's the obligatory interview. Then, the big celebration over at the museum, the delegations from as far away as Peru and Paraguay, an ordeal really, making that many little party sandwiches and the nephews and nieces not always showing up in time to help. But this is March, !Marma Santmsima! Doesn't she have seven more months of anonymity?

"How about this afternoon? I do have a later commitment," Dedi lies to the voice. She has to. Otherwise, they go on and on, asking the most impertinent questions.

There is a veritable racket of gratitude on the other end, and Dedi has to smile at some of the imported nonsense of this woman's Spanish. "I am so compromised," she is saying, "by the openness of your warm manner."

"So if I'm coming from Santiago, I drive on past Salcedo?" the woman asks.

"Exactamente. And then where you see a great big anacahuita tree, you turn left."

"A ... great ... big ... tree ...," the woman repeats. She is writing all this down! "I turn left. What's the name of the street?"

"It's just the road by the anacahuita tree. We don't name them," Dedi says, driven to doodling to contain her impatience. On the back of an envelope left beside the museum phone, she has sketched an enormous tree, laden with flowers, the branches squirreling over the flap. "You see, most of the campesinos around here can't read, so it wouldn't do us any good to put names on the roads."

The voice laughs, embarrassed. "Of course. You must think I'm so outside of things." Tan afuera de la cosa.

Dedi bites her lip. "Not at all," she lies. "I'll see you this afternoon then."

"About what time?" the voice wants to know.

Oh yes. The gringos need a time. But there isn't a clock time for this kind of just-right moment. "Any time after three or three-thirty, four-ish."

"Dominican time, eh?" The woman laughs.

"!Exactamente!" Finally, the woman is getting the hang of how things are done here. Even after she has laid the receiver in its cradle, Dedi goes on elaborating the root system of her anacahuita tree, shading the branches, and then for the fun of it, opening and closing the flap of the envelope to watch the tree come apart and then back together again.

* * *

In the garden, Dedi is surprised to hear the radio in the outdoor kitchen announce that it is only three o'clock. She has been waiting expectantly since after lunch, tidying up the patch of garden this American woman will be able to see from the galerma. This is certainly one reason why Dedi shies from these interviews. Before she knows it, she is setting up her life as if it were an exhibit labeled neatly for those who can read: THE SISTER WHO SURVIVED.

Usually, if she works it right-a lemonade with lemons from the tree Patria planted, a quick tour of the house the girls grew up in-usually they leave, satisfied, without asking the prickly questions that have left Dedi lost in her memories for weeks at a time, searching for the answer. Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?

She bends to her special beauty, the butterfly orchid she smuggled back from Hawaii two years ago. For three years in a row Dedi has won a trip, the prize for making the most sales of anyone in her company Her niece Minou has noted more than once the irony of Dedi's "new" profession, actually embarked upon a decade ago, after her divorce. She is the company's top life insurance salesperson. Everyone wants to buy a policy from the woman who just missed being killed along with her three sisters. Can she help it?

The slamming of a car door startles Dedi. When she calms herself she finds she has snipped her prize butterfly orchid. She picks up the fallen blossom and trims the stem, wincing. Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things-in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

But really, this woman should shut car doors with less violence. Spare an aging woman's nerves. And I'm not the only one, Dedi thinks. Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.

* * *

She walks the woman quickly through the house, Mama's bedroom, mine and Patria's, but mostly mine since Patria married so young, Minerva and Marma Teresa's. The other bedroom she does not say was her father's after he and Mama stopped sleeping together. There are the three pictures of the girls, old favorites that are now emblazoned on the posters every November, making these once intimate snapshots seem too famous to be the sisters she knew.

Dedi has placed a silk orchid in a vase on the little table below them. She still feels guilty about not continuing Mama's tribute of a fresh blossom for the girls every day But the truth is, she doesn't have the time anymore, with a job, the museum, a household to run. You can't be a modern woman and insist on the old sentimentalities. And who was the fresh orchid for, anyway? Dedi looks up at those young faces, and she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.

The interview woman stops before the portraits, and Dedi waits for her to ask which one was which or how old they were when these were taken, facts Dedi has at the ready, having delivered them so many times. But instead the thin waif of a woman asks, "And where are you?"

Dedi laughs uneasily It's as if the woman has read her mind. "I have this hallway just for the girls," she says. Over the woman's shoulder, she sees she has left the door to her room ajar, her nightgown flung with distressing abandon on her bed. She wishes she had gone through the house and shut the doors to the bedrooms.

"No, I mean, where are you in the sequence, the youngest, the oldest?"

So the woman has not read any of the articles or biographies around. Dedi is relieved. This means that they can spend the time talking about the simple facts that give Dedi the illusion that hers was just an ordinary family, too-birthdays and weddings and new babies, the peaks in that graph of normalcy.

Dedi goes through the sequence.

"So fast in age," the woman notes, using an awkward phrase.

Dedi nods. "The first three of us were born close, but in other ways, you see, we were so different."

"Oh?" the woman asks.

"Yes, so different. Minerva was always into her wrongs and rights." Dedi realizes she is speaking to the picture of Minerva, as if she were assigning her a part, pinning her down with a handful of adjectives, the beautiful, intelligent, high-minded Minerva. "And Maria Teresa, ay, Dios," Dedi sighs, emotion in her voice in spite of herself. "Still a girl when she died, pobrecita, just turned twenty-five." Dedi moves on to the last picture and rights the frame. "Sweet Patria, always her religion was so important."

"Always?" the woman says, just the slightest challenge in her voice.

"Always," Dedi affirms, used to this fixed, .monolithic language around interviewers and mythologizers of her sisters. "Well, almost always."

* * *

She walks the woman out of the house into the galerma where the rocking chairs wait. A kitten lies recklessly under the runners, and she shoos it away "What is it you want to know?" Dedi asks bluntly. And then because the question does seem to ruddy call the woman to account for herself, she adds, "Because there is so much to tell."

The woman laughs as she says, "Tell me all of it."

Dedi looks at her watch as a polite reminder to the woman that the visit is circumscribed. "There are books and articles. I could have Tono at the museum show you the letters and diaries."

"That would be great," the woman says, staring at the orchid Dedi is still holding in her hand. Obviously, she wants more. She looks up, shyly. "I just have to say, it's really so easy to talk to you. I mean, you're so open and cheerful How do you keep such a tragedy from taking you under? I'm not sure I am explaining myself?"

Dedi sighs. Yes, the woman is making perfect sense. She thinks of an article she read at the beauty salon, by a Jewish lady who survived a concentration camp. "There were many many happy years. I remember those. I try anyhow. I tell myself, Dedi, concentrate on the positive! My niece Minou tells me I am doing some transcending meditation, something like that. She took the course in the capital.

"I'll tell myself, Dedi, in your memory it is such and such a day, and I start over, playing the happy moment in my head. This is my movies-I have no television here."

"It works?"

"Of course," Dedi says, almost fiercely. And when it doesn't work, she thinks, I get stuck playing the same bad moment. But why speak of that.

"Tell me about one of those moments," the woman asks, her face naked with curiosity. She looks down quickly as if to hide it.

Dedi hesitates, but her mind is already racing backwards, year by year by year, to the moment she has fixed in her memory as zero.