Book Review

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

As promised, this is the book review. 

Written by Kim Edwards, this book is mainly about choices that are very human but that take over life like a drop of ink in water. 

Edwards gleefully picks up fistfuls of stigma and prejudices and scatters them in the winds of this heart-breaking story. When I say heart-breaking, I mean it. I have always felt that it is easy to make your readers cry. I will not take names but this is probably why I did not like some best-seller books. It is difficult to make readers laugh (PGW) and it is difficult to make them think. This book makes you think. It makes you want to see your life and choices differently. 

Let's start with an excerpt [Please don't read it if you are drunk (which means S can never read it!) or if you are in a flippant mood. Read it in a solemn mood and you will know what I mean]. 

Her voice, high and clear, moved through the leaves, through the sunlight. It splashed onto the gravel, the grass. He imagined the notes falling into the air like stones into water, rippling the invisible surface of the world. Waves of sound, waves of light: his father had tried to pin everything down, but the world was fluid and could not be contained. 

Leaves lifted; sunlight swam. The words of this old hymn came back to him, and Paul picked up the harmony. Phoebe did not seem to notice. She sang on, accepting his voice as she might the wind. Their singing merged, and the music was inside him, a humming in his flesh, and it was outside, too, her voice a twin to his own. 

I'll not take up much of your time. I'll highlight the highlights. :)

Snapshot: The year is 1964. On a windy, snowy storm of a night, Dr. David Henry is forced to deliver his own twins, a girl and a boy. The boy, he sees, is fine. But in the girl, he instantly recognizes Down's syndrome. His own childhood saddled with the sorrow of a terminal sister, he makes an irreversible decision and asks his nurse the take the baby to a home.  

1) Language: 

Probably the first thing you'd have noticed anyway is the fluid imagery that Edwards uses. Everything is poetic. The dappling of light, the flowing of water, the running of blood in veins. How often do you see comparisons between a tulip petal and the delicate veins of an eyelid? Page after page takes you to mundane everyday happenings but keeps you absorbed with every minute detail. Like the colors on the street, the scraps of conversations, and the play of shadows. You live everything the main characters go through. 

2) Narration:

This is all I have to say about the narration: The jacket of every book nowadays has the words 'But when the killer starts targeting her friends and associates, she can't help but get deeper and deeper into the mystery.' The 'engross-factor' of your book is directly proportional to the number of murders/deaths in your book. Compare it with the narration in this book, where the heroine removing a wasp's nest is given 3 pages of attention, complete with details. But a death is not actually depicted. Just the sorrow.....

I could probably go on and on. But you'd have got the point at around my sixth sentence in this post :)

Let me just end by saying this. You know how they say that some books really stay with you long after you've read them? This one's still staying with me and my landlord is not gonna like it.... :)

Official site for 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter'

If you read it, please comment.