The book is written from the viewpoints of everyone involved: the donor, the leukemia patient, the parents, the lawyer. I'm fascinated by the parents: the mother cannot, will not, canNOT see her daughter die, and since the younger sister can prevent that from happening, Anna *will* do it. She's not a broadly-drawn harpy or maniacal cold-hearted bitch; she's a mother who's been fighting for 14 years and doesn't realize there's a world outside of leukemia. The father is torn and throws himself into his work while wondering where his family, his marriage, and his life have gone. It's not a perfect novel by any means, but it's pretty solid.

What scares me so much is the immediacy of such a novel; it's already begun and will be the new big issue in the medical community for the next decade. I'm not going into the ethics of these kinds of things, but I will say that I think it's horrible to basically use one child to keep the other alive just because medicine can--especially when the child is genetically engineered to do it. There's an issue of 'quality of life' here that is murky and ugly and can only be decided by the people involved, but it... it breaks my heart.

Back to the book: I think you should read it. I think everybody should read it, simply because I really believe that this is where science (and medicine) is heading, and sometimes fiction can help make the repercussions and discussions more real.