Two Books

Although I missed my book club meeting last week (I was scheduled to be in three places at one time on Thursday night and surprisingly, I could only physically be in one!), I did finish the book selection – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. 

The ‘memory keeper’ refers to a camera – and the daughter is the baby girl with Down’s Syndrome that was given away at birth by the baby’s father.  The baby was one of a set of boy/girl twins that was delivered by the father during a snowstorm.  The boy was delivered healthy – the mother was told that the daughter had died.  The nurse was ordered to take the baby girl, Phoebe, away to an institution for the ‘mentally feeble’, but the nurse couldn’t do leave here there and then raises the child as her own.

I know that this book has received some really good reviews and I’m certainly no literary expert, but I didn’t really enjoy it.  First, I just could NOT get over what the father had done.  I know that the author tried to make us sympathetic toward him (he had a terminally ill sister that died when he was young), but I just couldn’t forgive him or understand not only how he could give that baby away, but also how he could keep it from his wife.

Plus, the book seemed extremely lopsided to me.  The beginning was full of extreme, minute detail (a little too flowery for my taste – I’d rather have a story with substance) and then at the end, everything sped up and we were left with few details.  It’s like Ms. Edwards realized that the book was going to be too long, so she just compressed the end.  All of a sudden and without any detail or information, the father dies.  You think that would be worth more detail than the look of the sand and sky on the beach when the mother cheats on him (oops – now I’ve given some of the story away – I wouldn’t recommend reading the book anyway… :).

This was not the worst book I’ve ever read, but certainly not the best.  I had to force myself to read the second half of the book – I didn’t care, quite frankly, what happened to any of the characters after that point.

Okay, so now that I’ve finished that book (and that was just my opinion, mind you), I’ve started reading the next book club selection – March by Geraldine Brooks.

This book follows the absentee father of the March family from Little Women while he is away fighting the Civil War.  I haven’t read much yet, but so far, some of the war scenes have been quite gory (but I suppose that’s what war is, isn’t it?).  I’ll let you know what I think when I’m finished…