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Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

Obwohl die Taschenbuchausgabe mittlerweile billiger ist als das E-Book, konnte ich einfach nicht länger widerstehen und lud es mir auf den Paperwhite. Und - natürlich - lohnte es sich doch, nicht nur wegen der unerwarteten Enthüllung am Ende der Anhörung und dem völlig überraschenden Ende (das vermutlich vielen Lesern das Buch verleidet hat), sondern auch weil viele Nebencharaktere genauso bewegend und mitreissend geschrieben sind wie die Hauptpersonen, und Picoult es schafft selbst die am negativsten erscheinende Figur der Mutter sympathisch und verständlich zu machen.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed - sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
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Mr Hume, my science teacher, taught us about the primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates...which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.
The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what yuo believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.
More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.
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When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.
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I try to work through the few things she has said, tracing them and trying to make sense of them the way the Greeks somehow found five points in the sky and decided it looked like a woman's body.
Then it hits me - I am looking in the wrong place. The Aboriginal people of Australia, for example, look between the constellations of the Greeks and the Romans into the black wash of sky, and find an emu hiding under the Southern Cross where there are no stars. There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
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There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven yuong girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.
Make of it what you will.

(Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper, 2004)