First Person Addiction

I am currently reading My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I'm nearly at the halfway mark at this point, and I have some thoughts on what I have read thus far. The subject matter is compelling. The story is about a family -the quintessential: one father, one mother, son and daughter- who live happily until the two year old daughter is diagnosed with a rare kind of leukemia. To prolong the life of their daughter the parents create a designer baby. A third child is one more then this family wanted, but they need this baby because they need to have a perfect donor match for their sick daughter. The main action in this story is set thirteen years later when Anna, the designer baby, decides that she doesn't want to be that donor anymore and wants medical emancipation.

As I said I am not quite halfway through the story and I don't want to do an in depth critique of it yet. What I would like to talk about is the style of the writing.

I have read one other of Jodi Picoult's books and started another. All three are told with the same trick. Several different characters are given chapters to express themselves. These chapters are told from the first person. Which I am not opposed to as an idea in itself, the execution of this idea however I have some difficulties with.

In My Sister's Keeper, there isn't a satisfactory difference in voice. The thirteen year old voice of Anna sounds the same as her mothers or her lawyers. Anna's perspective is in the first person, but I can't believe that these are really her thoughts, I'd be more likely to buy that they are her thoughts as they have been filtered through an adult recollection of the events. We are told through other characters perceptions of Anna that she is very grown up for her age, but that isn't an explanation for why her chapters feel the same as the adult ones do.

Another problem is that nothing new seems to be learned from being inside so many characters heads. We seem so of the same conversations from different sides, but in doing so, we learn nothing new.

This story should have been told from the third person. The flaws in characterization wouldn't have been as obvious to the reader. It would not limit this particular story as characters can still be followed on their own particular journeys, what we learn about them can still be shown in the same way. It is not uncommon to find the omnipresent narrator who can tell us snippets of what Bobby and Jane are thinking and that's all that the author is revealing here -snippets.

There is one puzzling question I have still to ponder. Different fonts have been used in different chapters for different characters; however these fonts do not consistently belong to any one character, the differences seem completely arbitrary. If I can figure out the pattern as I read on I'll let you know.

More on My Sister's Keeper later.