A Review of the Book "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards

Title: The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Author: Kim Edwards
Publisher: Penguin Books
Year: 2006
401 pages

It is not often I don't finish a book. Even if I'm not totally enjoying it, I will push through because leaving a book partially read feels...well...blasphemous.

But I just couldn't finish this one. The story is a really good - a father not wanting to take care of a baby with Down Syndrome sends it away, telling his wife the baby died in childbirth, a nurse not being able to leave the baby at an institution runs away with her and raises her as her own daughter, secrets that eventually catch up with everyone.

The writing, however, is atrocious. For being an award-winning book, there needed to be way more editing. There were so many details and random tangents that you forget what is actually happening and have to go back and reread paragraphs, sometimes even pages.

Maybe one day I will come back to this one and try it again. But for someone who can read a book in days, I have been hacking away at this one for months and still only made it two-thirds of the way through before finally throwing in the towel.

If I do ever make it through it, I will give an updated review. Hopefully, I just wasn't in the mood to read this book, but then again, I can't love them all!