Book Review: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim something

I’m bad with authors but I figure that if I give you enough information to find the book if you want to read it, good enough. I’m just too lazy to look it up.

I really enjoyed this book. The basic premise is that a couple in the 1960s has twins: a healthy baby boy and a baby girl who, according to the father, died. In fact, she has Down’s Syndrome but he thinks that it would be too much for his wife to bear and he asks the nurse to take the baby to an institution. The nurse eventually chooses to raise the baby herself and the story really begins. The story is essentially about the mother and father dealing with their different losses, the son growing up and the daughter and the nurse’s very different journey. I found it to be very well written and an interesting look at all the characters and their relationships. The book dealt with the difficulties of the daughter’s illness without making it all about her problems. We get snapshots of varying parts of their lives, every few years, and we get to see the children grow to be adults. Clearly such a big decision made by the father will have an impact, sometimes predictably so, on all of their lives but I feel that the story handles the impact very well.