Lone Wolf looks at the intersection between medical science and moral choices. If we can keep people who have no hope for recovery alive artificially, should they also be allowed to die artificially? Does the potential to save someone else’s life with a donated organ balance the act of hastening another’s death? And finally, when a father’s life hangs in the balance, which sibling should get to decide his fate?
Your book My Sister’s Keeper is one of the most- often banned books, according to the American Library Association. How does that make you feel?
bottle, until he is redeemed by an evangelical church, whose charismatic pastor, Clive Lincoln, has vowed to fight the “homosexual agenda” that has threatened traditional family values in America. But this mission becomes personal for Max, when Zoe and her same- sex partner say they want permission to raise his unborn child.
Sing You Home explores what it means to be gay in today’s world and how reproductive science has outstripped the legal system. Are embryos people or property? What challenges do same-sex couples face when it comes to marriage and adoption? What happens when religion and sexual orientation — two issues that are supposed to be justice-blind — enter the courtroom? And most importantly, what constitutes a “traditional family” in today’s day and age?
Can you give me a hint about 2012?
Edward Warren, 23, has been living in Thailand for five years, a prodigal son who left his family after an irreparable fight with his father, Luke. But he gets a frantic phone call: His dad lies comatose in a New Hampshire hospital, gravely injured in the same accident that has also injured his younger sister, Cara.
Cara, 17, still holds a grudge against her brother, since his departure led to her parents’ divorce. In the aftermath, she’s lived with her father — an animal conservationist who became famous after living with a wild wolf pack in the Canadian wild. It is impossible for her to reconcile the still, broken man in the hospital bed with her vibrant, dynamic father.
With Luke’s chances for recovery dwindling, Cara wants to wait for a miracle. But Edward wants to terminate life support and donate his father’s organs. Is he motivated by altruism or revenge? And to what lengths will his sister go to stop him from making an irrevocable decision?
Proud. I am in excellent company. Judy Blume, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, JD Salinger, Stephenie Meyer, JK Rowling, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison — and dozens of other wonderful writers have had their books challenged by schools. I believe in the freedom to read anything and everything. I also think, sadly, that some parents who oppose high schools teaching a book like My Sister’s Keeper believe that their children have never seen a swear word in print or watched a movie with a violence or sex scene. Or, in other words, they are sorely out of touch with their own kids.
If you read one of my books and all you can see is the foul language used by a character who’s a delinquent or a sex scene (which is in the book because it’s important to the story, i.e., date rape), then you are grossly missing the point. Why not instead read the book along with your child, and use it as a springboard for discussion about some of these tough or sensitive subjects?
What did you think of The Pact and Plain Truth airing as movies on Lifetime? Are any others going to make it to the big screen?
Let’s start with The Pact. Given that a book is never a movie, I thought that Lifetime and director Peter Werner did a wonderful job. They targeted the movie to Lifetime’s audience, which is why it was about the women and not the two teens. They treated teen suicide with great care, honesty and openness. They also went out of their way as a network to raise awareness of teen depression by using the movie, and that’s an incredibly proactive thing to do. Now, that said, I also believe that 40 different movies could have been made from that single book! This was just one of the options.
Plain Truth fared a little better for die-hard fans of the novel, because it followed the book much more closely than The Pact Lifetime movie did. It was the highest- rated Lifetime movie of 2004, so apparently a lot of