The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE SNOW STARTED TO FALL SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE HER labor began..." (more)
Key Phrases: David Henry, Caroline Gill, Norah Henry (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Edwards's assured but schematic debut novel (after her collection, The Secrets of a Fire King) hinges on the birth of fraternal twins, a healthy boy and a girl with Down syndrome, resulting in the father's disavowal of his newborn daughter. A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky., in 1964, and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Henry, must deliver their babies himself, aided only by a nurse. Seeing his daughter's handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill, to take her to a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged during labor, that their son Paul's twin died at birth. Instead of institutionalizing Phoebe, Caroline absconds with her to Pittsburgh. David's deception becomes the defining moment of the main characters' lives, and Phoebe's absence corrodes her birth family's core over the course of the next 25 years. David's undetected lie warps his marriage; he grapples with guilt; Norah mourns her lost child; and Paul not only deals with his parents' icy relationship but with his own yearnings for his sister as well. Though the impact of Phoebe's loss makes sense, Edwards's redundant handling of the trope robs it of credibility. This neatly structured story is a little too moist with compassion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

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."

Edwards has trouble maintaining the electrifying atmosphere of this long opening scene, but David's fateful decision that night is enough to power the novel through the next 25 years. The story runs along parallel tracks that don't converge until the very end: The first follows the picture-perfect Henry family, three healthy, talented people separated from one another by the secret that only David knows. The other track follows David's nurse, Caroline, who couldn't bring herself to follow his instructions that night. Instead, she left town with his baby, struggled through a series of part-time jobs, battled an unresponsive school system and managed to hammer out a joyful life.

As a single mother at a time when special-needs accommodations are unheard of or considered naively radical, Caroline would seem to have a far more difficult path to travel. Edwards does nothing to minimize or romanticize that struggle, but Caroline makes her humble way in the world through sheer determination and with the help of like-minded activist parents who are beginning to argue that children with disabilities should be raised at home and attend regular schools.

Those two sets of lives make for a thought-provoking contrast, a study in what really determines a family's happiness. With a successful, lucrative career, David can give his wife and son everything, except candor. As Edwards points out -- probably too many times -- the effort to conceal what he's done with their daughter poisons the atmosphere of their home with a colorless, odorless gas of deception. David throws himself into photography, a poignant attempt to freeze perfect moments and crop life just as he wants it. Barred from her husband's heart, Norah turns to alcohol, then to a series of affairs, trying to deaden or distract herself from a sense of loss she can't fully understand.

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.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143037145
• ISBN-13: 978-0143037149
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (959 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,739 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

518 of 579 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this, read this, read this!, November 26, 2005

By	K. G Havemann "ARabidReader" (Dayton, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Hardcover)

I don't read a lot of fiction and I most especially do not read romances. I'm not sure how this book is categorized but it is the most compulsively readable, emotional, and memorable book I've read since "Gone With the Wind" over 40 years ago. This is an epic story of a doctor who, in an emotional moment and with all his medical knowledge telling him to protect those he loves, makes a decision that affects him and everyone around him forever. On a blizzardly night in 1964, David Henry helps his wife give birth to twins, one a perfect boy and the other a girl with Downs Syndrome. At that time, imperfect children were "put away" in institutions where they died young and families and friends spoke of them in shame-filled whispers, if at all. David grew up with a very sickly sister whose death at age 12 ended all meaningful life for his parents. With all good intentions of sparing his wife and new son the pain he and his parents endured, he made a fateful decision and told his wife the little girl had died at birth. It was a decision that, once made, could not be redeemed nor remedied. Time inexorably moves away from that moment but, instead of becoming distant, it grows tentacles that seize their beings and influence everything for the next three decades. We learn a photograph can capture a moment but it cannot tell you what encompasses it, what came before and after. It cannot effect change, it cannot correct. One moment, one choice, and an ever-widening circle of consequences, many roads taken and many not.

The writing in The Memory Keeper's Daughter is so well-articulated, the story itself is so engrossing and so different from any I have read before, that hard as I tried to remain disaffected, about 100 pages before the end I felt actual pain knowing there was a last page. As I came to know every nuance of these characters, I wanted to reach into the pages and tell them everything, something, anything, to stop time, to take a different road and change the past, then go on again. Honestly, I have never felt quite this way about a book before.

54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For such a rich subject...left me completely unmoved, September 14, 2007

By	RMurray847 "afilmcritic.com" (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

The initial premise of the book is terrific. We're in the '60s and a doctor finds himself in a situation on a snowy night in which he must deliver his own child, with the help of his nurse Caroline (who has a secret crush on him). The first child, Paul, is healthy, but the second, a girl, is born with Down's Syndrome. The doctor, David, is convinced his wife Norah will not be able to "handle" the trauma of having such a child, so he decides, in an instant, to hand the poor girl to Caroline and asks her to take it to a home for such children and leave it there, never to mention the girl again. He tells his wife that the daughter has died. Caroline runs to the home,finds it to be a hugely disturbing place, and then looking into the face of this new baby, decides she can love the girl and provide her with a life. She runs off with the baby, ready to start a new and uncertain life.

These initial scenes are fairly well done, and though the decision David makes is abhorrent today...it is somewhat tempered by the fact that in the '60s, we as a society weren't quite so compassionate or understanding of folks with Downs. His logic about sparing his wife is questionable, however, and Edwards fairly effectively shows that the gulf between David's initial guilt and wariness about being caught and Norah's grief at losing a child drives the couple further apart. Norah is not allowed to grieve in the way she wants...for example, she isn't allowed to see the body of her lost daughter...for obvious reasons.

Anyway, after this the book falls apart. Author Kim Edwards, it becomes clear, hasn't learned the lesson of "showing us" how people are feeling and thinking, but telling us. We are told over and over that David's secret has blanketed his family, that it's driven him apart from his wife and son. We never really understand specifically how. Does David just act guilty all the time? Does Norah never get over her depression? Is she unable to show love to her son because she wants her daughter? I found the book to be almost completely unconvincing psychologically.

Also, every character in the book (possibly excepting the daughter Phoebe) is hugely UNLIKEABLE and UNSYMPATHETIC. David is simply a pompous jerk. Her makes this huge decision and then can't understand how his lie might effect other people. He just wants his wife to "get over it." Problem is, we see right from the beginning of the book, before the lie even happens, that this is not a happy couple and not one that should ever have married. Norah, the wife, marries David apparently without love for him, and then resents him for being very successful and providing for her and her son the kind of life she married him to get. We also learn a great deal about David's childhood, and none of that rings very true either...the David we see as an adult isn't convincingly the man the young David would have grown up to be.

The son,Paul, is shown as a typical sullen teenager who is not understood by his overbearing father. He escapes to playing guitar, and what do you know...he's practically a genius at that instrument. He talks about music in a way that no real person ever would...only in a way that writer's who can't show us how a person feels but must have them "tell" us.

On the other side of the story, we have the nurse Caroline. She appears to be somewhat heroic, because she does risk a lot to provide a life for Phoebe. Yet we never see the day to day struggles of dealing with a child with Down's Syndrome. Some brief early scenes are all we get...but the structure of the story skips all the day to day details and we see only the "end result,"...which doesn't seem to have been all that difficult...except that the author "tells" us that it was. While Caroline isn't unsympathetic she's just kind of bland and passive.

At one point in the later part of the book, David returns to his old hometown and meets an unusual character. I don't want to spoil it...but let's just say that this person's actions are totally silly at first, and then later this person is clearly meant to cause a seismic shift in the dynamics of David's family...instead we just kind of scratch our heads and wonder at the strangeness of everyone's behavior. I wish I could tell you more...but if you manage to slog your way this far into the book, you should at least have some surprises left.

It took me FOREVER to get through this poorly written, overwraught book. I kept going because it was SUCH a bestseller and so many people liked it. I guess I just totally missed it. I realize I'm asking to get huge amounts of "unhelpful" ratings, but I feel there must be other lone voices out there like me...who just found the book deeply unsatisfactory.

The only reason it gets two stars instead of one is that the initial premise IS original and was done well enough to make me buy the darn book in the first place and continue reading it in the hopes that the author's imagination would once again provide redemption. No such luck.

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Really wanted to love this book but didn't even like it..., October 9, 2007

By	MLRapp (NY) - See all my reviews

I really wanted to love this book....after all, its a National Bestseller, on multiple critic's "must-read" list, on my Amazon recommendations list every time I check, and I have had more than a few people recommend it to me. Also, after reading the first thirty pages or so, I was riveted - such a unique and interesting plot....I though the rest of the book would be sensational. However, not only was I wrong and beyond disappointed, but I just can't understand the hype surrounding this book!

Once the plot is set-up within the first thirty pages or so, the book utterly failed to deliver and just tanked. The writing is boring, trite and the entire middle of the book is way too repetitive. Each paragraph I read felt like I had read it before...saying the same thing ten different times/ways does not make a book interesting. In fact, I had a hard time forcing myself to keep reading, but kept thinking about the fact that so many people liked this book so figured maybe the ending would somehow redeem it. It didn't. The book went downhill fast and never recovered, not even at the end. I DO NOT recommend this book at all!