Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards

Heather Spears, Drawing of a Child with Down Syndrome

(June 10) This was one of those completely-don’t-get-it books for me. It was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and there are many on-line reviews in which readers rave about the book and list it as one of the three best books of the year or one of their Top 10 of all time... and I can’t see the enthusiasm at all. There are books I don’t like well but can still see why others would like them a lot, but this is not one of those. This is a book that you might grudgingly finish reading because it opens so well and you hope that the writer will rise to the occasion again... but she never does, so you finish the book with the writer greatly in your debt. You can forgive her and just lick your wounds, but you can’t rave about that book and rank it high.

The first chapter would have made a cool short story. The author did a really virtuoso job of weaving in a lot of camera science and technology as metaphors. These things made me give her the benefit of the doubt. But it was kind of a timid novel, never getting out of two dimensions, and I looked at my watch the whole time I read it.

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