The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Author: Kim Edwards
Genre: Extreme senti, Fiction
Publisher: Penguin

I picked this book from the ‘Crossword Recommends’ section. The situation was tense, I felt sorry for the book, she had to follow ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, and I was wondering…should I have bought more ‘Peanuts’? Every thing was going wrong…I picked the book because of the cover, the last time that happened was with ‘Almost Single’ and I remember how that turned out.

The book was dreadfully dull in the start; I would lie in bed, the sofa, the floor on my parents’ room hoping that the place would change how it read. I even screamed ‘why are you doing this to me?’ Lakshmi is at home, I would ask her “Please ve! Do something”.. of course my pain gave her joy beyond my capacity to describe …see all this drama is because I can’t stop reading a book and move to another, paapam the book will feel bad. Then slowly it got better and from the middle to the later parts it got really good.

The book is the story of a doctor who gives up his baby girl Phoebe at birth because she is born with Down’s syndrome, to protect his wife from the trauma of having a sick child. The book is about how it changes everything for his wife Norah, Caroline the woman who became Phoebe’s mother, Paul her twin, and haunts him for the rest of his life. The book spans 25 years and no one remains what they are at the beginning of the book. Also the book is centered on how it is never the intention behind the action, but the consequence that counts.

The characters are so intimately etched that you feel like you are watching them. The language is simple but full of meaning, yet you have to put in some effort in remaining with the book.

At one point Caroline says
“….I felt like I was writing to a void that is why I could express myself so freely”.
I am in perennial quest for my void.

It would make a really nice movie, the kind that you have never heard of and you accidentally catch it while surfing channels, and makes for great rainy Saturday afternoon viewing.