The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

The silence was so deep and encompassing that he felt himself floating to a new height, some point above this room and then beyond, where he was one with the snow and where this scene in the room was something unfolding in a different life, a life at which he was a random spectator like a scene glimpsed through a warmly lit window while walking on a darkened street. Later, when he considered this night - and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather - what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. He cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs.

Without volition he began to move through the familiar patterns. I give it 5 stars and recommend it, but be prepared to feel emotionally depleted.The baby's hand brushed his, and he started. The story was difficult but the writing was incredible. This was 400 pages of evidence that that is true.

I know that a single decision can change your whole life, but sheesh. I could not stop thinking about how much damage it did that poor family to have this secret between them, how much happier they could have been had they been open and honest with each other, how much they needed something to pull their family together. The story is about the course this family takes after this one pivotal event, and how David, Norah, their surviving son, Paul, and Caroline deal with their loss.

He plans to tell Norah the truth but can’t and so tells her that the baby died. David gives the second baby to Caroline, his nurse, and tells her to take the second baby, a girl, away to an institution. His wife gives birth to twins, the second with Downs Syndrome, but she’s unconscious because of the gas used for pain relief. The regular doctor gets stuck in the snow and can’t make it to the hospital, so David prepares to deliver his own child. The story opens in 1964 on a snowy night in Kentucky when Norah goes into labor. David and Norah Henry, a young couple expecting their first baby. The writing was amazing, so much imagery, but the story was absolutely gut wrenching. I loved it, but I will never read it again.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards