A Good Read: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

I had never heard of Kim Edwards but I bought a copy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter  (Viking Penguin, 2005) after browsing its pages. It was worth it.

Edwards has a refreshing style, one few since Virginia Woolf have matched. It’s a rare writer that can write about childbirth and do so with elegance and grace, but Edwards do so, as this excerpt demonstrates:

The snow started to fall several hours before her labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.

After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for at time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.

Her style compels the mind to read faster.

So many novelists in these times put out trite obscenity so nauseating that it’s a challenge to complete the first page. Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a reprieve from such books; it rescues us from what would be a general demise in letters. That's why it was number one on the New York Times Best Seller List. It is recommended.