Book of the Week: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

This week's book was The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. At the beginning of the story, a doctor's wife gives birth to twins during a winter storm at her husband's office. One baby, a little boy, is a perfectly typical little baby, but the other, a little girl, is born with Down's syndrome.

Based on the medical knowledge of the times and his experience growing up with a younger sister with a medical disability, the doctor chooses to have his daughter sent to a home for cognitively impaired individuals. He instructs the nurse that assisted him in the delivery to take the little girl to the home and leave her there. However, she chooses not to leave the baby there after a brief time spent in the lobby waiting for the contact person to meet with her to take the child.

Due to a series of other events, the young mother holds a funeral service for the baby girl she believed to have been stillborn, the doctor feels that he can no longer inform his wife of the girl's existence, and the nurse chooses to keep the little girl as her own, moving states away to raise her.

The story then chronicles the doctor and his wife's relationship, the life and struggles of the young girl and the nurse who adopts her, and the childhood of the brother who is believed to be the sole survivor of the birth.