I bought this book because I kept being drawn to the cover. The back cover blurb sounded intriguing enough. But it turned out to be one of those occassions where ’don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ came into effect. It took me ages to slog through this one – it was so boring. Almost all of the characters were frustrating and impossible to warm to (particularly Norah). They lacked depth, warmth and authenticity. The book was quite heavy in descriptive details of moments, but yet strangely not evocative.

When someone asked me about this book this was my response:

Memory Keeper’s Daughter. It was quite popular when it was published and I’ve heard really good things about it but I read it and found it rather boring. The plot had the potential to be very interesting. It was about a man who [I’m skipping extensive plot summary I typed up].

Overall it kind of meandered through everyone’s lives and the way this secret affects everyone and pulls them apart. Meandered is the key word there.

It got really wordy in some places where it didn’t need to be, the dialogue could be very unnatural in places, and I want to take a red pen to the thing and cross out entire passages that didn’t have a point.

After all of the plot thickening it ended pretty flatly. I was really disappointed.

It was okay but I don’t understand why so many people liked it. It wasn’t even that insightful. The author seems like a bit of a one-noter to me. Apparantly the short stories she published was called “Secrets of the Fire King” and then her other novel revolves around a secret. That’s all well and good but it gets boring after a while.

End of comment.

I agree with everyone’s complaints on this page. It had a lot of potential and wiggle room to make itself interesting, but it was too slow and unnatural. The characters seemed awkward to me when they spoke. Norah’s character fell victim to this the most I think.

Overall, disappointing, but still worth consuming. Maybe.

If you’re not into Stephen King at the beach or any of those suspense novels, this is a good option. It’s a nice story.. but the ending was straight out of “happily ever after” book.

The writing in this book was decent, sure, but the content was lacking. While there was great potential contained in the story, the “climax” was premature and, well, anti-climatic. Although we learn more about the characters throughout the book, there was no real progression or development of them. This book left me feeling dissappointed and slightly bored.

I like most everything I read. I really did not like this. There aren’t too many good things to say about it. I will say this, though. The story had the potential to be very powerful. It was lost in the fluffy descriptions of just about everything. The writing felt very forced. It just didn’t seem to flow, if you know what I mean. I had to force myself to finish the book because I just can’t leave a book unfinished. The climax also seemed to come about two-thirds of the way through the book, leaving about 100 pages of falling action, which was not particularly interesting. This was definetly not worth my time.

I just could not get into this book. Felt way too Oprah’s book club for me…I think I’m past sinking into fictional tragedy for a while.

I tore through this book in a day and not necessarily because it was good. There were parts in the dialogue that felt very trite and unconvincing. It is a story told honestly and earnestly; for that it gets 3 stars. I can’t say I could ever recommend this book to anyone as I don’t feel it had any redeeming qualities.