Reading "My Sister's Keeper" Pg. 260 - End

Alright. Let me get this out of the way before I start: I am not a good writer. For as much as I could go into how a good ending works and what can kill an ending, I admit to falling for most of the traps associated with writing an ending. I understand why an author would choose to make a surprising ending, twist ending, storybook ending or whathaveyou. But this I will get into after a few points are discussed.

To begin, all character's motivations (save Jesse, but I'll get to that) are revealed in a medley of revelation and closure. Campbell reveals that he is epileptic, Anna reveals that Kate had asked her to instigate the suit for her medical emancipation, Brian reveals that he wanted to let Kate die rather than watch her suffer, and many other things of less importance.

Something I never really touched on which I should have was the poor handling of Jesse as a character.  Or rather device, as aside from being the "antihero with a caring heart" trope, he is used only when something else important that doesn't directly involve him occurs. Where characters like Campbell and Anna are tied back to Kate just as the book has set up, they have their own voices and histories that are significant in their own right. With Jesse, he is a boy who was ignored and is now taking out his anger. That's all. Maybe that signifies how he was actually treated in the story, but this is disrespectful to a character that could have been much more. Not only is treating him like a plot device poor writing, his character and voice are poorly written as a whole. It's like reading what a mother thinks her brooding teenage boy would say and do.

"Fuck them all" Pg 93, as Jesse drives haphazardly down the wrong side of a highway. 

This line coming from an angry boy that evidently hates the world would be understandable, but the delivery of it along with what was obviously meant as a "shocking" segment where Jesse drives down a highway in his very first narration chapter, show just what Jesse was meant to be from the start. The off-child. The one who had the potential to solve the problems the others couldn't. And Picoult failed to give him a proper presentation. But it's ok because she made him reconcile with his father and made him a police officer in the end, right?!

With that out of the way, the characters appeared to have a proper "happy" ending, for as happy as this book could get considering its subject matter. When all of a sudden,

"Anna's head hit the window with great force, Mrs. Fitzgerald. It caused a fatal head injury." Pg 415

And that takes me back to the start, as Kate is then able to use her kidney and is then somehow cured, able to live while Anna is the sister who dies in the end. The story was built in such a way that this ending makes little sense; it's almost as if the ending wasn't planned until the very end. It was abrupt, out of nowhere, and coming back to Jesse, his reaction isn't shared of all of the main characters. The most damning peace of evidence for this point is at the very beginning:

"In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister... In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own… Or at least this is what I tell myself." - Prologue

Kate never wanted to kill her sister. In fact, there was never any evidence to suggest that she wanted anyone else to die other than herself. I somewhat understood it when this applied to Anna, as at the time she was receiving painful treatments for her sister without knowing why. She describes what suggests her smothering her sister in this prologue, and that would not be what Kate would ever do. Yet this mysterious person behind the prologue's sister dies. Plain and simple: the ending was not meant for the book. It was shoe-horned in. And that is my biggest qualm with this title.

In spite of a powerful emotional ride, the ending sours what would otherwise have been an interesting experience.