At last! A book I really enjoyed reading!

Not that the summary on the jacket gave me much hope of enjoyment as it seemed the usual fare of broken lives and nasty people. However The Memory Keeper's Daughter belied its blurb.
Memory_Keepers_Daughter
For me the single most important thing was that it was about people who were essentially doing things for the best. The terrible mistakes made by David are made with the best of intentions as he tries to protect his family from pain and sorrow. In doing this he cuts himself off from his wife and son emotionally and his daughter physically, sublimating his emotions in his work as a doctor and in his growing reputation as a photographer. Each member of the small cast of characters is rounded, decent and flawed so that you come to the end feeling that you have been reading about real people whom in another time and place you could easily know and like.

This was such a contrast to our last book, Half Broken Things which, while very well written in many ways felt contrived in the plotting (in some places very contrived indeed) and was about thoroughly unpleasant people.
HBT
As the book progresses we are given increasing psychological and sociological reasons for this unpleasantness, but I remained unconvinced by the character drawing although a member of the Bookworms who is a social worker said that none of it was wholly implausible even if the sum of the parts was somewhat far-fetched.

The fact remained that I read to the end more from a sense of duty, and found the end really very nasty indeed. One member of the group - who also held out to the end - was unable to sleep the night she finished it. Several members of the group were unable to finish the book, though they were as much put off by the very tiny print as by the plot and characters; publishers really should remember that the majority of fiction readers are middle aged and elderly women who do their reading by artificial light (mainly in bed with a dimmish light so as not to disturb hubby) and that clear dark print of a reasonnable size is essential. That said, Joe, who is young, male and single and has a talking book whenever possible on account of his dyslexia, was also unable to bring himself to listen for long.