LITERATURE ANALYSIS #3

1.  For this literature analysis, I read The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kimberly Edwards.  The story is a bout a doctor who is forced to deliver his twins because of snowy weather.  The second child, however, is a girl with Down syndrome.  The year is 1964, and the doctor asks the nurse, who has had a crush on him for the longest time, to take the baby to an institution he knows of before his wife wakes up from the gas she is on to help with the pain of labor.  It is revealed in a flashback that the doctor had a sister with Down syndrome who he idealized but who died young, and the doctor didn't want his wife or the first twin, his son, to go through that pain, and he didn't want to go through that pain again.  The story then switches point of view from Doctor Henry to the nurse, Caroline Gill, who takes the baby to the recommended institution but can't bring herself to give the newborn away when she meets the people that work there and sees how they treat the "patients."  Caroline, without really thinking about what she is doing, takes the baby back to her apartment, making friends with a trucker along the way.  After a couple of days, she finds out that Dr. Henry told his wife, Norah, that their daughter, Phoebe, had died, and Mrs. Henry is having a memorial service for their dead daughter, who is really in the dresser drawer in Caroline's apartment.  Caroline tells Dr. Henry that she kept the child and he gets angry.  Caroline quits her job and cuts all ties with her life in that town and moves to Pittsburgh with Phoebe.  The rest of the book takes snapshots of the lives of Paul, the first twin, and Phoebe, comparing their growth and development at a couple of months old, one year old, six years old, thirteen years old, eighteen years old, twenty-four years old, and twenty-five years old.  The point of view was changed from character to character.  In the end, (spoiler alert!) David dies suddenly of a heart attack after splitting up with Norah but before he tells her that Phoebe is still alive.  When Paul and Phoebe are twenty-five years old, Caroline Gill comes to Norah and tells her that Phoebe is alive.  The book ends with Paul and Phoebe bonding by singing at their father's grave, Paul putting the past behind and moving forward after spending years angry and resentful at his father and his life.