Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE ENTIRELY SPOILED! With the movie about to come out, I thought I should review this book to warn people about it. DON'T BOTHER! I actually really enjoyed the book (even with the rather clunky writing and unsubtle characterizations), and then the ending comes and I start screaming "What? You've gotta be kidding me!" It betrayed the entire premise of the book. It betrayed the characters. It certainly betrayed the reader. I will never read another book by this purveyor of pulp, and I refuse to go see the movie unless I am assured beforehand that they have re-written the ending so it makes sense with the rest of the story. Specifically, and these are spoilers: what I got from the book was that the mother was so determined to save her older daughter, Kate, that she had totally lost her moorings. Kate was suffering unbearably, and so were her other children and her husband. So Anna, the younger daughter, takes a stand on Kate's behalf, and says stop, Kate should decide when enough is enough and this is it. Kate has decided she has fought through ten years of misery just to take another breath, but that's not enough. She wants a quality of life that she just can't have. So she is going to step back, let her sister and her family live their lives, and accept her own lot in life. I thought that was a very moving and interesting perspective. Then, the end of this stupid book happens. Anna and Kate win their court case. They get to make their own medical decisions. Except they don't. "Fate" intervenes. Anna is killed in a stupid, cheap car crash. And suddenly her kidney, which was the point of the whole book, is basically up for grabs. So Kate just takes it. Even though the whole point of her character throughout the book was that she was done with medical procedures, suddenly the fact that her sister is a dead donor, instead of a perfectly willing live donor, makes her change her whole philosophy. And she takes the kidney. And she lives. So, it turns out that the mother was right all along. The girls were just "acting out," I guess. If they had just accepted one more medical procedure, everything would have been rosy. The whole premise of the book as I understood it -- that sometimes adolescents can see things adults can't, and can earn the right to determine their own destiny -- was just total b.s. Mommy always knows best. Oh, I cannot begin to express how I hated this conclusion. It made me feel like the entire book was an ugly practical joke.