The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards, 2005
A doctor makes one decision in a snowstorm, and two families spend decades living with it. A novel about secrets, parenthood, and the children we don't expect.
Kim Edwards
Kim Edwards's first novel became a word-of-mouth paperback hit; it spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
Feels like love, family and tenderness.
A doctor's training tells him what he is seeing before his heart can catch up.
Creamy white vernix whorled in her delicate skin, and she was slippery with amniotic fluid and traces of blood. The blue eyes were cloudy, the hair jet black, but he barely noticed all of this. What he was looking at were the unmistakable features, the eyes turned up as if with laughter, the epicanthal fold across their lids, the flattened nose. A classic case, he remembered his professor saying as they examined a similar child, years ago. A mongoloid. Do you know what that means? And the doctor, dutiful, had recited the symptoms he’d memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and mental development, possible heart complications, early death. The professor had nodded, placing his stethoscope on the baby’s smooth bare chest. Poor kid. There’s nothing they can do except try to keep him clean. They ought to spare themselves and send him to a home. Books by Kim Edwards
Authors with a similar feel
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
BookFeed is a feed of real passages from real books. It learns what moves you and finds your next book.
Open BookFeedFree, no sign-up.