| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780143037149 | | Publisher: Penguin Books | | Publish Date: 5/30/2006 | | Buy.com Sku: 202157416 | | Item#: R5H5YT | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 10299 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5L x 0.75T | | Pages: 432 |
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| | | | Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son is perfectly healthy, but his daughter has Down's syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect his wife, he asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, the nurse disappears into another city to raise the child herself.
From the Publisher:
Award-winning writer Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted 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 all 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. A rich and deeply moving page-turner, 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 occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. It is an astonishing tale of redemptive love.
Annotation:
During a snowstorm in 1964, Dr. David Henry delivers his own twin children, but when he realizes that the girl twin has Down syndrome he sends her away with a nurse and tells his wife that the girl died. This dark secret cripples the family in subtle but terrible ways. David, guilt-stricken, becomes icy and removed, finding solace only in his photography. His wife throws herself into her career and also a series of affairs. Paul, their son, turns to music to escape the unloving home. Meanwhile, Phoebe grows up in the home of the nurse, a lonely romantic who secretly loves David. Kim Edwards explores the psychological reverberations of the pivotal action with insight and heart.
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| Customer Reviews | ![]() | | Writing |  4 | | Content |  5 | | Readability | 4 | | Overall Satisfaction | 4 |
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4 of 5 Kim Edwards Needs a Good Editor Monday, August 21, 2006
ccull@parks.ca.gov from Sacramento, California
Though the typos and temporal/descriptive gaffes were not as bad as some who reviewed the book insisted they were, those I noted were troubling enough. It's hard to believe that this book was already out as a hardbound--I'd expect that those errors would have been corrected before they just put it out in paperback for even more to take note of.
However, as a research writer who also edits and proofreads the work of others, I freely admit to being super nit-picky. I read a lot, and have run across much stranger stuff than was in The Memory Keeper's Daughter.
It's good writing, though the characters are not as thoroughly drawn as I'd like to see. I want to know more about them, over a longer period of time, not just between long stretches. I want to know why these people do what they do. It's as though someone has all the facts, but they choose not to impart enough to answer all the questions that come up. What made David think that this situation was so much like his own unresolved childhood? Is he so emotionally stunted by his loss of his sister that he doesn't see that the decision he makes about Phoebe is not at all related to his sister's diseased heart?
How could he woo Norah so thoroughly, with so many heroic promises, then not only take away her flesh and blood, but go on a separate emotional vacation from then on? Talk about unkept promises! Then he just ups and dies, somewhere backstage, and the rest of the book is lost. It's almost as frustrating as when a writer introduces a character at the start, then abandons him until he's needed to tie things up at the end.
There is a lot more book here, but nothing that Kim Edwards can't write. She is very good, and by and large the book is so well written that I was happy to suspend disbelief for the time it took to finish it.
But I reiterate--Kim Edwards needs someone to read her stuff more than once, so that she doesn't say something and then contradict herself several pages later.
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