The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel by Kim Edwards
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Book Reviews of The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel
Book Review: The Memory Keeper's Daughter: great fiction and a great romance
Summary: 5 Stars
Normally I wouldn't touch a mix of fiction and romance, but this one is different. Really awesome!
My first daughter was born lifeless and gray-blue. "Like a seal," I remember thinking as the room went bright white and the doctor started suctioning her mouth. I pushed my wife's head back onto the pillow so she wouldn't be able to see the slick form down below. The oxygen tank hissed angrily. In the minutes that followed, as we waited and waited for my daughter to cry, all the hopes we'd stored up were suffocated under the weight of our new future that filled the room with fear.
Mercifully, few parents experience the shattering birth moment we did, and it may be that memories of my daughter's birth magnified the emotional impact of Kim Edwards's debut novel. But I think anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter. The book opens during a snowstorm in Lexington, Ky., in 1964, when Norah Henry realizes that she's going into labor. The weather keeps her doctor from making it to the office in time, but her husband, David, is an orthopedic surgeon with enough experience to handle the situation. Under the partial influence of gas, Norah gives birth to a healthy baby boy, but as David tells her the happy news, another series of contractions begins. He quickly sedates his wife again, and she gives birth to another child, a girl with Down syndrome.
"Later," Edwards writes, "when he considered this night -- and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather -- what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling outside." In that quiet, terrifying moment, the grief and resentment caused by his sister's death at the age of 12 washes back over him, and he acts to preserve their vision of a happy future. He hands the baby to his nurse and asks her to take it to a home outside the city for handicapped children. When Norah awakens a few minutes later, he tells her their second baby was stillborn. "He had wanted to spare her," Edwards writes, "to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past."
Some ominously saccharine moments indicate that Edwards can slip into the treacly trade -- "The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away" -- but these gaffes are relatively infrequent, especially considering the presence of a handicapped character, who would, in less disciplined hands, be used to generate a waterfall of sentimental tears.
The episodic structure allows Edwards to survey these two families through the '60s, '70s and '80s, but frankly she's best when she moves slowly. The middle section skips through the years, obscuring the characters behind Significant Historical Moments: Women's Lib, Vietnam, Disability Rights. The novel begins to look as though it's been planned by a divorced dad: Every alternating weekend encounter has to be packed with a major activity. This structural tendency may be the effect of Edwards's experience as a short story writer. We drop in on these characters only on important days -- separated by years that included all the minutiae of real life. They're reduced to saying things like, "The last few years have meant so much to me." I kept thinking, No, show the true nature of these people on a few ordinary days.
Edwards is entirely capable of doing that, as the opening and closing sections of her novel show. This tragedy of a man who thinks he can control how lives are redirected is as moving as the story of his nurse, who knows that her love can bless a damaged life. In the end, it's not just that David made a mistake in a moment of crisis; it's that he never realized that parenthood is an infinite series of opportunities for redemption. Years after the choice he could never forgive himself, for, as Caroline tells him, "You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy." Readers of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will find ample stores of both.
Book Review: A dysfunctional family.
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed this book. The writer did a grea job describing the cities of Lexington and Pittsburgh and the countryside in the areas the book was taking place. The book is beautifully written.
It was hard to really like David Henry. He was a doctor who did much for the community and those needing medical help but who couldn't afford it. He had free clinics and spent much time working in them. But he treated his family shabbily driving his wife and son away and giving his daughter to whoever would have her.
He had contempt for his son's love of music and wanting to be a musician his life's career. Get a real job he told his son. His son always felt his father disliked him and had contempt for him.
His lonely wife wanted more children,he didn't. Paul was to be an only child. Norah went into the travel agency business. Her first affair was with a wife cheating tourist. Then she travelled with her clients and had many affairs. David never seemed to care. He had become very involved with photography. Paul was embarrased by both parents.
Phoebe, Paul's Downe syndrome twin was adopted by Caroline who was David's nurse who had loved him and not wanting to put Phoebe into a home for the feeble mineded. She felt Phoebe deserved more and ran off to Pittsburgh taking the baby and raising her as her own. She married Al, a good men, who became a father to Phoebe. When David, who became engrossed in his photography, before it was medicine, had a show in Pittsburgh, she wanted to see the show and the person David had become. She went to the show, spoke to David, then realized him for a cold selfish person who cared only for himself. David, wanted to see her again but she had left the photography show. He wondered why he had not married Caroline instead of Norah. He felt her goodness but she had walked away. She was gone, then he realized how much he loved her.
David married Norah because he thought she came from a higher up family. Caroline was the child of older parents and came from a family not much better than the poverty stricken hill billy family he had come from and which he had moved away from never to return.
But back in the 60s it was common to leave a retarded child forgotten in a school for the feeble minded. He felt Norah would be overworked taking care of a Downs syndrome child plus Paul would be embarrassed by having a retarded sister.
After David dies Caroline visits Norah and tells her that the daughter she thought dead and mourned for so many years was alive and living in Pittsburgh. Norah wants to see her and tells Paul his sister is alive. Both go to see her and accept her. Phoebe dosen't quite accept them. She tells them Caroline and Al are her real parents.
Of that family Phoebe is the happiest accepting herself as she is. She has a boy friend, a job and tells everyong she is getting married. Norah finally meets a man she loves and who loves her and gets married. Paul loves a young woman who doesn't love him and leaves him bereft.
Book Review: Excellent Story
Summary: 5 Stars
As the snow piles up outside, Dr. David Henry is in a clinic, delivering his wife's first child. She unexpectedly has twins, a boy and a girl. While the boy, Paul, is healthy, the girl, Phoebe, has Down's syndrome. David, who personally knows the pain that a sick child can cause, abruptly decides to send Phoebe to an institution. Believing that he is making the right decision, he tells his wife, Norah, that she died in birth. The nurse, Caroline Gill, is commissioned to bring Phoebe to the institution, but she can't bear to. Instead, she raises Phoebe herself. Memory Keeper's Daughter is told from the points of view of David, Norah, Paul, and Caroline, as the lives of two separate but linked families unfold.
A compelling realistic fiction story, Memory Keeper's Daughter follows the lives of both families as Phoebe and Paul grow up. The two families could not be any more different. The Henry house is full of tension and separation. David, Norah, and Paul become disconnected, as David is swallowed by guilt, Norah mourns Phoebe, and Paul plays guitar to the point of isolation. Caroline, on the other hand, marries a kind truck driver named Al, and they raise Phoebe in a home full of laughter. Watching these two families grow up so differently brings up many questions. What would have happened if David had made a different choice? Where would Caroline be? What would happen to Phoebe, and Norah, and Paul? How would their lives be different?
In the second when David hands Phoebe to Caroline, the rest of his life changes dramatically. He can not go back and change the past, and he can't erase what he has done. He has to live with his decision, and the effects of it. They ripple throughout his life, changing his family forever. As the book puts it, "He had given their daughter away. This secret stood in the middle of their family; it shaped their lives together. He knew it, he saw it, visible to him as a rock wall grown up between them." This "rock wall" changes the dynamics of the family; whenever Norah or Paul tries to connect with David, the tension of the secret gets in the way. Thus, although they live in the same house, they are strangers to one another.
Caroline, however, has a loving home. Phoebe is sweet, caring, and innocent, and Al is funny and kind. Most importantly, their home isn't divided by a "rock wall"; instead, they're comfortable with each other. For Caroline, David's decision had had positive effects on her family: she inherited Phoebe, her beloved daughter, and she met her husband.
Kim Edwards weaves a believable and memorable tale about the effects of a single decision in the lives of two families. By the end of the book, Paul, Norah, and David felt like actual, three-dimensional humans. Their motivations were realistic, and their personalities well rounded. Memory Keeper's Daughter is an amazing story that reflects the enormous power of a single decision.
Book Review: Slow unraveling of a marriage
Summary: 5 Stars
Kim Edwards has done a stunning job depicting how people often present different sides of themselves to different people - sometimes deliberately, sometimes unknowingly. With the marriage of David and Norah, Edwards takes this to the extreme, creating two sympathetic characters who come to know less and less of each other as the years pass.
The book begins with David, a doctor, being forced to deliver his own twins during a snowstorm. The boy arrives in perfect health, but David realizes immediately upon seeing the girl that she has Down's syndrome. David had a sister with a physical handicap that caused her to die when she was only 12, and her death destroyed his mother's life. With this memory at the forefront of his mind, David makes the immediate decision to send the girl to a home and tell his wife that the baby died so that she would be spared the crushing grief that would come when the girl died young. This well-intentioned decision marks the beginning of the years' long unraveling of their marriage.
Despite David's intention of sparing Norah the grief of losing a child, Norah suffers unbearably for years, feeling the loss of her daughter as its own presence, one that she believes she must carry quietly for fear of being ostracized for her failure to let go and move on. This grief and loneliness lead her into depression and alcoholism.
Because David knows his daughter is not dead, he does not grieve for her in the same way that his wife does, and Norah interprets his lack of grief for lack of emotion, and shuts her husband out of her emotional life, lashing out at him with rage (both hot and cold) repeatedly over the years.
Edwards has so fully drawn David that the reader is forced to see him in his entirety, rather than simply damning him for his monstrous decision to give away his baby and lie to his wife about it. The reader sees what Norah does not - that David made the decision out of love for her and feels the crushing weight of his decision daily, accepting the pain as something he must bear.
The novel is so much more than an examination of a slowly dying marriage, but the different sides of themselves that David and Norah present to each other showcase Edwards' skill in illustrating how it's possible to be a stranger to one so close. Several other aspects of the book are devastatingly and beautifully done and merit full reviews of their own. Not having that much mental energy, I'll simply encourage you to read the book for yourself. It is at turns a deeply painful yet uplifting look at how our decisions shape our lives.
Book Review: A Nearly Perfect Selection For A Book Club
Summary: 5 Stars
I was in a bookstore the other day and noticed that in a section marked off for book clubs, THE MEMORY KEEPER'S DAUGHTER seemed to be the choice of the month. Since it's found a home on the bestseller lists, this is probably the case all over the country. A lot of people are reading THE MEMORY KEEPER'S DAUGHTER, and after you read it you'll probably agree it's not without good cause.
The book tells the story of David and Norah Henry. Norah gives birth to twins and one has Downs' Syndrome. David makes the rash decision to institutionalize the child and tell Norah the child has died, convincing himself it's for the best. The remainder of the book deals with the repercussions of the decision not only on David and Norah and their family but also Caroline Gill, the only person who knows the full extent of what happened the night the twins were born.
Now if I am going to be honest, I can't say for sure that I would have completed the book if the book club I belong to didn't select this title. I found the subject intriguing, the writing is beautiful, and it's compelling, but I could see it as a book I'd start at one point and finish at a later date as I do with many books. I guess it's just my habit, but I had to complete the book in an allotted amount of time, so I did so in a few sittings. If anything, this heightened the dramatic impact. The more I read, the more I was drawn into the story. I found myself reacting, in some cases somewhat strongly, to situations that take place in the book, decisions made, and the aftermath of these decisions. The more I read, the more I could not wait until the group met so we could really examine this book. In the end we had one of the liveliest and most diverse discussions I can remember. We looked at questions such as: Why do we make certain decisions we make and how would we react if we were in the same situation as the characters in the book? Is there anything that can't be forgiven? When, if ever, is it appropriate to keep secrets? The book touches people on so many levels, the possibilities for discussion are endless. My guess is that it's also a book that will keep coming back to a reader, a sure sign of a good book.
If you are thinking of a perfect book for a book club, this could be a perfect choice. As a matter of fact, the only book I recall eliciting more discussion is THE KITE RUNNER.