What was your emotional reaction as you read? Why?
My heart went out to both the family and the little girl. I could see things from both their perspectives. I was touched by the courage of the little girl and her sister and I felt very sorry for the family having to deal with losing their child to cancer.
Who would you recommend this reading to and why?
I would recommend this book to anyone with a warm heart and losts of empathy. It was a very sad story but very enlightening. It makes you ask some very heart-wrenching ethical questions and there is a surprise twist to the plot at the end of the story.
Consider the setting.
The settings were realistic. The story itself was not true but very, very believable.
Consider the story/plot.
The story was very believable. It was about a young girl who battles cancers and her fight to try to make her own decisions about living and dying. It makes you examine the ethics of conceiving a child to save another child and what rights she has to her own body.
Consider character development.
The characters were well developed. You felt like you knew these people and could see things from their different perspecitives. However, the mother's complete lack of empathy for her daughter's predicament is not very true-to-life or the pyromaniac tendencies of the older brother to seek attention of his own. Also the fact that Sara would try to represent herself in court doesn't ring true.
What was the message/purpose of the writing?
The message was that everyone should have the right to make their own personal decisions about living and dying.
Compare and contrast reading to movie adaptations.
The movie was somewhat different from the book. I preferred the book to the movie.
Nonfiction: Describe the facts and research.
The book was well researched and very realistic. I thought at first that it must be nonfiction but it wasn't/
