Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Creative Writing 101: Show, Don't Tell December 3, 2008
heather (Wisconsin, USA)
I picked up this book fascinated by the story line on the back cover, but as I began to read, I found myself scratching my head in wonder. I felt as though the author had a severe case of ADD, and I had just spent 14.00 to be jarred around in this mysterious world of aimless thought. It was very disappointing. Honestly, I felt the author was trying to see how lyrical she could be with the English language rather than truly telling a story with depth.
It's not good to assume your reader has no imagination, and frankly, defeats the purpose of writing to begin with (entertainment via fantasy). It's rather insulting to the reader, not to mention boring and monotonous, and ultimately makes for bad storytelling, in my opinion.
In short, I found the author's writing style tedious and extreme which ultimately dampened the story and the characters.
 Merely OK December 2, 2008
A. Melrose (USA)
I thought that this book looked and sounded like one that I wouldn't be able to put down. For the first few chapters, I was very interested in it. After that, it became difficult for me to read. Not because I couldn't understand it or because it was poorly written, but because it was boring and a little predictable. It wasn't the worst book that I've read in recent months, but it was far from being the best. I'm not likely to purchase another of Kim Edwards' books in the future.
 A story of misguided Love November 30, 2008
E. B. (Kansas)
Sometimes the choices we make in the name of protecting someone we love can cause the object of our love more harm than good. So it is with Dr. David Henry.
When twins, a boy and a girl, are born to his wife, and the girl has Downs Syndrome, he decides it would be better for his wife to think the child died at birth. He puts the infant in the hands of his nurse to take to an institution. Instead, she keeps the girl and the child becomes a blessing to her and her husband. In the doctor's family, the wife cannot come to terms with her loss and her husband cannot forget the child he abandoned and both contribute to the breakdown of their marriage. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is an excellent story of both heartbreak and happiness and the validation of Downs Syndrome children as loving, happy individuals and, although they may need extra care, they can be as much a blessing to a family as any child.
Eunice Boeve, author of Ride a Shadowed Trail
Well written, but . . . November 28, 2008
L. Lamb
I had high hopes for this book and was disappointed from the beginning. Although descriptive, it failed to evoke emotion. I found myself wanting to be finished with the book. I love books of all types, but I want them to entertain me. This one didn't.
Beautiful, artful handling of many difficult themes November 26, 2008
L2T (Washington DC)
I found the story to be beautiful and sad, but fell short of depressing. Instead, I was fascinated as Edwards deftly explored so many themes. She accurately, yet with a graceful subtely, reflected the epochal decades the characters pass through in the book. The disappointment for couples of finding it so difficult to remain in love, or even simply to communicate, after marriage. The long stretches of emotionally numbing day-to-day life in a marriage. The very real and little undstood depression mothers often experience when their children are very young, when they are beautiful yet so emotionally and physically draining. The challange to so many people who, like David, left poor, rural communities post WWII, getting an education, yet still feeling a keen sense of inadequacy or embarrassment about their origins. The transition afoot in the 60s and 70s, and the disorientation often involved for both wives and husbands, in finding, feeling that it was not necessarily a given that women must stay at home rearing children. How do couples maintain their individuality within a relationship, without erecting walls between them that can't be crossed. The stunning dislocation for parents of trying to cope with volatile teenage children, and often not surviving unscathed.
Hence, the story treats so much more than the effect of guilt over the dark secret of the twin sister. The delicate personal and societal issues of dealing with handicapped persons are, like the other themes, handled tenderly and openly, yet without being forced on the reader. Nevertheless, much of what Edwards describes could happen in any relationship, to any couple trying to master the complexities of making marriage and family work, particularly in that era. It's almost as if the secret of Phoebe's existence serves to accentuate, accelerate and heighten the tensions that would have have existed, in any event, in the lives of Norah and David. This secret gives what might otherwise be mundane themes an added edge and poignancy, a reason to be written about.
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