I pre-ordered The Memory Keeper's Daughter after reading about it in a blog. At the time, I was revising Old Fabric, New Patterns, which deals in part with how a lost baby can haunt a woman, so I was intrigued. When it arrived, I saw this particular lost baby had Down Syndrome, which only piqued my interest since I also have a daughter with Down Syndrome. During a blizzard, Dr. David Henry delivers his wife of twins, and he sees that the girl-baby has Down Syndrome. He gives her to his nurse to institutionalize, but instead, the nurse takes the baby to raise as her own. Dr. Henry tells his wife the baby died. A powerful concept, with characters very well-drawn, The Memory Keeper's Daughter has moments of brilliance--but it's uneven. I never could decide who "the memory keeper" was, for one thing. And there were mistakes about Down Syndrome that I find unforgivable. For instance (please make a note of this), it's “Down Syndrome,” not “Down's Syndrome.” It's named after the man who initially described it, not someone who actually had the syndrome, hence no apostrophe. This is a small detail, but it's hard to take an author seriously who gets something this basic wrong. Yes, I know it's possible a copy editor went in and changed what the author had written correctly, but in that case, the author had a responsibility to educate the copy editor. Another thing: at one point, the father-doctor thinks to himself that the odds of having a second child with DS are very slim. In fact, if a couple has a child with DS, their odds of having a second increase by a full percentage point. Now 1 percent may not seem like much to you, but since my odds of having the first one were about one in 400, it makes one in 100 look pretty risky. So from a parent's standpoint, if you rolled the dice and such a longshot came up, it isn't credible that you'd consider one percent a slim chance. A small detail, again, but significant evidence that the author only read about DS; she didn't manage to get inside the head of a parent. And one more thing: Dr. Henry looks into his infant daughter's eyes, recognizes immediately that she has Down Syndrome, and makes his decision accordingly. Sounds simple enough, right? Except it isn't. It isn't easy to recognize in a newborn. When my daughter was born, I had a midwife who also was an early interventionist: she worked with babies and toddlers all the time who had disabilities, including DS. Yet she didn't recognize my daughter's. When we took the baby to the pediatrician for a check-up a day or two after birth, I told the doctor I suspected she had DS, and he laughed at me. He only agreed to do the blood test to settle my worries. Having said that, I'll also admit that the first time I looked into her eyes, I thought to myself (in these exact words), "That baby has Down Syndrome." I didn't mention it to anyone since no one else seemed to see anything odd, and I knew the midwife had experience with babies who had DS. My husband's family placed such high values on intelligence, that I was terrified to mention it, but as soon as he went to sleep that night, I hit the Internet and looked for information. So it's possible the author knew a parent can see what a doctor cannot, so I probably would have overlooked this "mistake" if she'd gotten the name of the syndrome correct. Despite the flaws, the book had moments of exaltation. And the study of how a family is affected by such a great, ongoing lie is fascinating. Worth the read--but borrow it from the library rather than buying it.