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by Suzanne Buchert
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter “The snow started to fall several hours before her labor began.” The appearance of a Border’s Book Store near my home has brought a good news/bad news scenario into my life. The good news is I have been able to find quite a few books I think I would like to read, at a discount price, just when I was getting a bit nervous about not finding much to interest me from my preferred book source of many years, Quality Paperback Book Club. The bad news is I have been able to find quite a few books I think I would like to read………etc. The shelves are overflowing again, I am no longer anxious that I might just run out of books, and I am jockeying books in the pecking order with an alarming frequency. I have long avoided “best sellers” from a sort of reverse snobbishness. How good could they be if everyone was reading them! However, the people at Border’s have concocted a nefarious scheme where they place lots of recent and a few not so recent books on a table right smack dab in the middle of the aisle and then label them all “Buy Two and Get the Third Book Free”. I ask you, how is a bargain book addict to resist that come-on? Too bad they haven’t included a book with a 12 step program for compulsive book buyers. Of course, they are too clever to let that happen. So, here I am reviewing a #1 New York Times Bestseller, “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter”. This book actually caught my eye on a number of occasions due to the cover art. It shows a little girl’s nearly transparent dress on a dark background. It is the kind of dress I am wearing in a baby picture my Mother gave me years ago. It is the kind of puffy sleeved, fine cotton lawn dress baby girls used to wear that are usually only seen now at antique stores. The story line is intriguing to say the least. The delivery of his baby during a mammoth snow storm by the doctor- father and his nurse takes a unexpected turn when a second baby, a girl, is born with unmistakable signs of Downs Syndrome. Doctor-Dad hands the baby to the nurse, as his wife, who was anesthetized after the first baby was born, sleeps on. He instructs the nurse to take the baby to a nearby “home” he knows of. The nurse drives off as the storm ends, but is unable to leave the baby at the seedy home. Instead, she disappears to another state and a new life with this child of a man she has fallen in love with. The doctor is left to tell his wife whopper after whopper about this second child, who he says died at birth. Sounds like a real pot boiler, and it is. The plot is pretty predictable, but it is well written and became a sort of a page turner for me. Edwards does manage to throw in a big surprise near the end that I definitely wasn’t expecting and has a fairy tale ending, but not with the cast of characters I would have predicted. If that tidbit doesn’t interest you enough to get this book…..I don’t know what more I can say. I also have a clinker to toss out this month. I began V.S. Naipaul’s “A Way In The World”, read quite a bit of it and finally gave up. It was just weird; not much happened, it jumped around from one century and country to another, there was not a likeable character in the first 100+ pages and I finally gave up. I guess I am just not intellectual enough for this book, which received a glowing review from several major newspapers. Do try Naipaul’s book “Among the Believers, An Islamic Journey”. It is a non-fiction work, incredibly interesting and readable. Until next month…..keep reading.
Suzanne Buchert and her husband, Keith, own several restaurants.
sbuchert@hotmail.com
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