"The best way to avoid disappointment is to not expect anything from anyone."

Gizmo loves to read with me!

To add to the quote above, one shouldn't expect anything from anything, either, including books!  I believe expectations are a big cause of the disappointment I felt with My Sister's Keeper.  Not the sole cause, but certainly a contributing factor.  Going in, based on descriptions I had read about the book, the expectation was that I would be reading an entirely fresh and original novel.
WARNING... SPOILERS AHEAD!
The basic premise sounds fresh and original - a girl (Anna) who was genetically conceived by her parents solely as a means of prolonging the life of their daughter (Kate).  I say prolong rather than save because the kind of Leukemia that Kate has is explained as being one that will inevitably kill her, however may be slowed down by various forms of treatment (all of which need a donor; and not just any donor, but a perfectly matched donor which they do not currently have within the family).  So what is a mother to do here?  Well, genetically engineer an offspring that is a perfect match, of course.  Anna has served as this life-prolonging donor for Kate for 13 years through various forms of donations/surgeries, but now Kate needs a kidney and Anna seeks out a lawyer to sue her parents for medical emancipation.
This is what drew me in.  It sounded like a story of Anna seeking out control over her life and a means of asserting her own free will as well as a story that would address all sorts of ethical questions and an internal struggle between wanting to save a loved one but not in a way in which you have to sacrifice yourself in the process.  However, it turns out it wasn't even Anna's own free will/control being sought after, but rather was Kate's wish to stop fighting the fight against her disease that led to the lawsuit in the first place.  There were some deep ethical questions raised (hello!  The mom conceiving the child solely as a donor for her daughter and who, no matter how much the book tried to make it seem otherwise, never loved Anna the way she did Kate), but the way in which they were presented was simply not what I had expected.  Quite frankly, in my opinion, it was not in a way that was fresh or original, but rather was riddled with cliches, poorly written and contained unnecessary subplots and slapped together ending that seemed designed solely for shock value rather than tying up the story.  It felt like The Lovely Bones again, except a million times worse because in this case, I was not impressed with the book leading up to the ending in any way.  The chapters alternated between points of view, which is typically a method I enjoy.  However, in this case there were SEVEN points of view.  Yes, that's right, seven.  Several of these could easily have been done away with, as they did not contribute anything for me to the true focus of the story, and their subplots were just plain stupid.  Take, for example, the points of view of Anna's lawyer and her guardian ad litem, who just happened to have had a star-crossed high school romance (her being a hipster and he being a rich, preppy jock... cliche much?), and now thanks to the fates have been reunited, reconnect and get married all within the span of the novel!  If I sound bitter, it's because I am.  This story line was just plain stupid and did not need to be there.  There was by far enough subject matter to explore just within the basic premise without including this stereotypical, superficial storyline thrown into the mix.  If these characters truly needed to be developed in order to tell the main story (though I honestly do not feel that they needed to be), there certainly must have been a better way to do it.
The other subplot that made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room the second I figured out what was happening was that of the firefighter dad and arsonist son.  I mean really?  Seriously?  Again, like there isn't enough good, rich material to develop in the main story, we have to throw in yet another horrible cliche?  Because of this and the aforementioned disappointing subplot, every time there was a chapter devoted to Jesse (arsonist son), Campbell (lawyer) or Julia (guardian ad litem) I just wanted to skip past them.  I didn't, but the point here is that 3 out of the 7 points of view felt out of place, as if they were taking me away from the real content, which meant almost half of the book was nothing more than an annoyance to me. 

Reading parties are the best!

Yet I forged ahead, and after working through, skipping back and forth amongst these seven different points of view, we end up discovering that what seemed to be the main story (Anna feeling inner turmoil over wanting to have some control over her life by way of medical control and thereby being able to exercise some free will of her own while also wanting her sister to live) was actually something else entirely (that it was actually Kate's own desire to stop receiving treatment and asking Anna to help her die that facilitated everything).  This felt like yet another cliche, of being torn between respecting the wishes of a dying loved one while still wanting to do everything in your power to keep them alive for your own selfish desires.  When this was revealed, I had essentially given up on having any positive feelings about the book.  Fortunately, this happened to correspond with the moment in which the author seems to have run out of steam (what little steam she even had) and then threw the ending on, an intense ending which only received 10 pages of book space.  In this ending, Anna is on her way to the hospital with her lawyer to see her dying sister Kate, gets in a car wreck, ends up brain dead, her parents have to remove her from life support and the lawyer who is now in charge of her medical well being has to be the one to decide to donate her kidney to Kate.  We got 10 pages for all of this to unfold, when the mind-numbingly stupid subplots received at least 5 times that.  It was an ending slapped on for shock value and I found it insulting.  Oh, and then we receive a couple pages of epilogue from Kate's point of view 8 years later... just to let us know yeah, she had a bit of a rough go after the kidney transplant but now she's somehow perfectly healthy!  Oh, and that arsonist son who was so deeply troubled throughout 400 pages of the book?  Well he just happened to miraculously turn around (because you know...losing a sibling wouldn't cause him more trauma, it would just make him a better person) and he became a decorated police officer.  And underneath all of this, I wonder... WHAT THE HECK?!!  The entire main story about control over one's own body, finding out it was actually Kate's wishes to not receive the kidney (rather than Anna's wish not to give her one) culminated in everyone knowing this...including her parents and Anna's lawyer yet it never seemed to be a question (not that there was any room for questions in the ridiculously unsubstantial 10 pages allotted to the ending) whether Kate would get the transplant.  Though I suppose that's because the main focus of the book was never actually the main story.  
I went into this one, as I said, expecting a profound novel when in fact it is chick lit.  Don't get me wrong here, I LOVE me some chick lit.  However, I love it when I'm going into it with the intention of reading a chick lit book.  Though honestly, I can't imagine liking this book even as a chick lit read, because the cliches, uninspired subplots and annoying characters were far too plentiful and I felt manipulated by the author every step of the way.
I'm going into my next read, PS, I Love You, fully expecting chick lit.  I have never read this one, but have seen the movie a bunch of times.  It's a movie that I enjoy even though I cry through about 95% of it.  I'm curious to see how the experience of reading the book will compare to watching the movie.  There's only one way to find out (by starting to read it), which I shall be commencing now.