“The Memory Keeper’s Daughter”
by Kim Edwards
Published: June 2005
ISBN: 0670034169

(Updated: August 26, 2007.)

From the Publisher…

Award-winning writer Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted, completely riveting family drama that explores every mother’s silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child, and she grew up without you? On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down’s syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century — in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by David Henry’s fateful decision that long-ago winter night. Rich, compulsively readable, and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter captures the way life takes unexpected turns, and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that hold a occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.

For all of its pages, I found this book to truly be a “one idea” work. Maybe all books begin with one idea but most, it seems to me, spin threads from this and weave the whole into a tapestry. This book seems to simply show a single thread.

It is interesting to explore the consequences that a split second decision can have through the telling of this story but I’ll admit to being impatient with the missed opportunties for other split second decisions along the way. I fell into a rather apathetic mood as the story continued on without ever really unfolding.

So… I did not find this “deeply moving”. I found the story “too bad” and I found the most interesting character, Norah, barely explored. I was glad to close the back cover and leave the grey mood way behind. All in all, this book holds a two out of five hearts on my scale.