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Book Reviewed by: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?
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.
Comment: It could be easy to cast David as the bad guy in Edwards's first
novel, after all he's the one who rejects his daughter in a split second
decision that will impact every member of his family, more than he could have
imagined, but Edwards makes sure that we see his decision in the context of the
times and also his personal experience - losing his own sister at the age of 12.
The irony in The Memory Keeper's Daughter lies in the depiction of the
parallel lives the two families lead - on the one hand, the picture perfect
family of three distanced from each other by the secret that only David knows;
and the other, the tale of Caroline, the nurse, who cannot bring herself to take
the baby and instead raises her as her own - a single-mother with a disabled
daughter who manage to find happiness despite facing a largely
unsympathetic world and an inflexible school system.
The Memory Keeper's Daughter is not without faults - it is a little
syrupy at times and Edwards is challenged to maintain the impact of her opening
pages, but it is still a very good first novel and one that would make for
good discussion in a book group.
..continued
Full Review
(512 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
At first glance the heartfelt tale told in The Memory Keeper's Daughter
has little in common with the children's book The Sea of Trolls, also
recommended in this issue, but dig a little deeper and a connection does
appear.
In The Memory Keeper's Daughter David Henry sends his daughter away, out
of sight, never to be talked of; in the Sea of Trolls Jack must navigate
the terrifying world of trolls, changelings and the like. Many scholars
believe the European legends of changeling children originated as a way of
explaining the birth of children with mental and physical handicaps. In
olden times, rather than be burdened with the responsibility for raising a
handicapped child the parents could conclude ...
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If you liked The Memory Keeper's Daughter, try these:
by Mira Bartok
Published 2011
The Memory Palace is a breathtaking literary memoir about the complex meaning of love, truth, and the capacity for forgiveness among family.
by Lionel Shriver
Published 2006
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered fellow high-school friends and staff in a horrific rampage. Two years later, it is time for Eva to come to terms with her life and the decisions she made.
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Jodi Picoult
Unfolds from an absolutely gripping premise, drawing you deeply and irrevocably into the entangled lives of two families and the devastating secret that shaped them both. I loved this riveting story.
