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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Lack of story,
By
This review is from: The Memory Keeper's Daughter Doubleday Large Print Home Library Edition (Hardcover)
The main story happens within the first 100 pages of the book. You can save yourself reading even the first 100 pages by reading the book flap instead. Kim Edwards struggles for the next 300 pages to add substance to the story. She is a very descriptive writer and can write for a half page or more on how lint looks on a shirt. I felt that she used her creative descriptions to compensate for a lack of story in the book. I found myself distracted by her writing style and skimming entire pages hoping to find some substance in the story.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Recorded Books - how could you?,
By
This review is from: The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Audio CD)
As a long time "reader" of Recorded Books brand audio recordings, I found Ilyana Kadushin's rendering of this work far below the high standards set by the likes of readers like George Guidall, Barbara Caruso, etc. The premise of the tale is intriguing. A physician, David, delivers his own son on a stormy night and is subsequently surprised by the birth of a second child - a twin daughter with Down's syndrome. While his wife, Norah, is still foggy from childbirth sedation commonly employed in the 1960's, the father turns his daughter over to a nurse, Caroline, for dispatch to a sanitarium. He later tells his wife that they had twins but while their son, Paul, is fine, their daughter died. Meanwhile the Caroline rushes the child to the institution but is horrified by the conditions and on an impulse decides to start a new life and raise the child, Phoebe, as her own. The story follows the ensuing years and the effect of these two decisions on the participants. This was my introduction to Ms. Kadushin's reading and I was surprised and disappointed to encounter such a monotonous delivery of a tale that I wanted to hear. Accents come and accents go. The reading flows like water struggling over the choppiest terrain imaginable. There was no distinction of voice among the characters and I constantly found my thoughts drifting elsewhere rather than being held by the complications of life for the characters involved. I managed to stick it out through all 14 CD's but in the end I couldn't have cared less what happened and I couldn't help thinking I would have felt much differently had the reading of this work been delivered to a more competent voice. Perhaps Ms. Kadushin's voice talent shines in other works but in this instance it just didn't deliver.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
save yourself some time, read the cover...it tells the whole story,
By bigmomma (CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Memory Keeper's Daughter Doubleday Large Print Home Library Edition (Hardcover)
This could have been a compelling story. Sadly, the author appears to have spent most of her writing energy looking up adjectives to endlessly describe shafts of light or leaves falling. In the end, I simply did not care what happened to her characters, I found myself skimming pages in search of anything that would push the story forward...never found much.
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