Here's a picture of the book I'm currently reading: (I've finished The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles - needed for Literature - but that'll be for another post as well).
There are a couple of categories through which I sort out the basic review of the book:
1. Back Cover Glimpse
2. Personal Thoughts
3. Sample Passages
...
Back Cover Glimpse
Families have secrets they hide even from themselves...
It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives forever.
For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse.
As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.
...
Personal Thoughts
The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. A really, really good novel, because the author manages to highlight the intricacies of human relationships while still allowing there to be a high level of mundane realism, in order for us gentle readers to read every slight happiness, every wretched feeling with a touched soul, and her descriptive language is appropriate at times when necessary (though Kim wonderfully holds it back when there's no requirement for it).
In all, it is a lovely book, with a good plot. It covers the time span of 20 to 30 years (not sure, haven't finished the book yet) and Kim does this with a skill that facilitates the development of the story, and does not hinder the story even as she skips a few years.
...
Sample Passages
"I'm not an invalid," she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn. Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.
He held the infant, forgetting what he ought to do next. Her tiny hands were perfect. But the gap between her big toes and the others, that was there, like a missing tooth, and when he looked deeply at her eyes he saw the Brushfield spots, as tiny and distinct as flecks of snow in the irises. He imagined her heart, the size of a plum and very possibly defective, and he thought of the nursery, so carefully painted, with its soft animals and single crib. He thought of his wife, standing on the sidewalk before their brightly veiled home, saying, Our lives will never be the same.
... but really it was his guilt that had kept him distant. He had handed their daughter to Caroline Fill and the secret had taken root; it had grown and blossomed in the center of his family. For years he'd come home to watch Norah, mixing drinks or tying on an apron, and he'd think how lovely she was and how he hardly knew her.
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