The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Meh. Entertaining enough that I wanted to finish it to find out how it ended, but i hated all of the characters and found the whole premise ridiculous.

LFL find...not sure if I should put it back, as I wouldn't want someone else to squander their time with this one.
The beginning was intriguing. The rest was a redundant, dark, and dull slog through the depressing lives of David, Norah, and Paul. Wish I hadn't wasted my time reading this one.

A slow-moving exploration of the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the people around us. I found moments deeply moving and insightful about my own life and relationships, even if I occasionally lost interest in the characters and their story.

All conflict is manufactured from secrets that would've had consequences if they got out but also would've produced conflict regardless.

I hate how to make David a sympathetic character they had to make Norah just as terrible

This book was pretty good. I'm glad they all met in the end. I think David was a coward, and saw himself as the victim. He saw the damage his actions did too late and then was too paralyzed by guilt to fix it. Norah, Paul and Caroline were the stronger characters.

The year is 1964. A young doctor, David Henry, helps deliver his twins. One is a healthy son and the other is a daughter who is born with Down's Syndrome. At that moment Dr. Henry chooses to hand over his daughter to his nurse, sending her to a facility which will take care of her and tells his wife that their daughter was delivered dead. With this simple act we are taken through the years silently reading about the events that unfolded as a result.

Reading this book was like being in a fog. It was like breathing, eating, living a fog full of secrets where nothing at all was as it seemed. And so sad. The moment I read the very first sentence I felt this way. It was a very eerie feeling. Even moments when there should be happiness it was sad. Even moments where there was nothing but happiness it was almost as if you were afraid to be happy too like it was taboo.


It was interesting to see how it all unfolded. I'm having a hard time rating it because although it was well written it left me with such a heavy feeling. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood to read this kind of book at this time. Perhaps I didn't quite agree with some of the characters, their train of thought and their actions. I will settle on 4 stars only because you will enjoy it if you feel this is your kind of book. If you are into more of a light read then I say RUN the other way.

Hmm. This book was okay. Which I really feel like is damning with faint praise when it comes from a reader like me, who has a high tolerance for the type of “higher brow” chick lit that gets sold on the front table of airport bookstores. There's the potential for an interesting plot, but that really gets bungled by the fact that Edwards' characters all turn out to be martyrs, and not even martyrs who are all that different from one another. And I guess I don't really believe in martyrs who don't have martyr complexes, so I ended up not feeling a ton (or a tiny bit) of sympathy for the pathos they all endure. There were parts that were compelling, but whenever I finish a book mostly out of obligation (and the desperate, irrational hope that things will turn awesome in the last 100 pages), I feel like that's a bad sign. I guess that means I have a book-finishing-martyr-complex.

Even the book has a good story, I don't really enjoy reading this book.
There are too many details, and it is hard to keep my mind to focus on the main story.

A distressing story about a pair of twins separated at birth, but a story that is really about the decisions that people make, and how they impact others in the end. Beautifully written.

This was a really compelling read once I got into it. I had a hard time with the first few chapters because I utterly did not sympathize with the dad, but once the perspectives started shifting I liked it. I was pretty impressed with its portrayal of Down syndrome (after Savarese´s disability lit seminar I´ve been touchy about such things).

A little depressing - how well can people really know each other? But the story line is interesting.