The Book Tavern Review: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
“A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how”.
The book goes about a happily married doctor who takes his wife into labor, only to discover that instead of this night being life-changing in all the good ways, it turns out to be the start of all unexpected events. As his wife delivers her first healthy boy, she then delivers his twin; a girl with down syndrome. At the sight of her, the doctor is immediately haunted by the painful memories he’s experienced with his sister who shared the same illness. The action he took that night, and the secret that followed were yet to turn his family’s life upside down. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is one of those books were its reviews either skyrocket or go downhill, no in-betweens. But for the sake of it, I’ll voice those who stand in the middle. I can’t say I hated the book, and I can’t say I absolutely loved it either and here’s why.
So here’s what I liked about the book:
The plot was rather interesting and a new personal read and the fact that the entire book was based on one little secret that unexpectedly re-surfaced in an unimaginable yet quite realistic way was in fact quite admirable. I also liked how the author devoted considerable effort to portraying a full and clear picture in regards to how each family member was feeling, and how the arc of each character has developed throughout the chapters.
What didn’t I like was:
The messy transition between the narrative of the present and an older memory or a recollection of a past event, like whoa where are we now? The transitions could have been executed better, and as good as the details were in forming a bigger picture of the context, it was just too much sometimes (I seriously did NOT need to know how many teaspoons of sugar the doctor takes in his cup!).
Yet overall, as I said earlier, this book stands in the middle of the bad-to- epic scale. I’d recommend it to parents; it would DEFINITELY help them see things differently, and to patient readers who don’t mind excessive details.
