The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

I picked this book up at the library a week or so ago, on a whim, because when Mr. A has picked out his books, he's ready to go. Now. Mostly I was just intrigued by the cover and the title.

This book is beautifully heartbreaking. It begins in 1964; a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own children. The first child is a boy, perfectly healthy. Then a little girl is born, with Down's syndrome. He hands the girl to the nurse, Caroline Gill, who is assisting him and tells her to take the girl to an institution. Caroline, however, after seeing the institution, cannot bear to leave the child there. So she packs up her apartment and leaves town. David tells his wife that the little girl died shortly after being born.

The book follows David and Caroline and the twins throughout the next twenty five years. David and his family slowly disintegrate; the absence of the second child and the wall erected by the lie David tells oppresses them and pulls them apart from one another.

Caroline's life truly begins when she decides to leave town with the baby girl. She fights to get her daughter an education; she finds love and gets married; she stops waiting for life to happen and begins to live it.

Throughout the narrative of the two families, David's photography hobby is interwoven. He is a broken man, traumatized by the death of his own sister when he was twelve. His decision to give his daughter away sprang from a desire to save himself and his wife terrible pain. In photography, he tries to find a way of halting the painful forward march of time and to find a way to mesh together his difficult family life with his professional life. For David, there is very little healing, because he cannot embrace the difficulties and the joys of life. Caroline, on the other hand, is able to do so, to open her heart to her daughter and her intense needs, and so to find the joy that comes out of suffering.