The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards

Families have secrets they hide even from themselves...
It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives forever.
For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only tome will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse.
As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her way in the world as best she can.

I was really disappointed by the Memory Keeper's Daughter. Selected as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, and handling the subject of down's syndrome, I expected Kim Edwards to have written a poignant, sympathetic and moving novel. I certainly did not find it so. The story moves slowly, and although I realise that in the 60's and before, children with this condition were commited to nursing homes and asylums, I found it unconvincing. Dr David Henry's reasons for giving away his daughter Pheobe, were based around the fact that his own sister had a heart defect, and died prematurely, impacting on his childhood and the lives of his family. This I could just not relate to.
The bulk of the book is centred around David, his wife Nora, their son Paul and how David's act of deceit poisons the happy family they are meant to be. Paul's teenage rebellion was probably the most realistic part of the story.
I was hugely disappointed with Edwards' treatment of the subject of down's syndrome. Little is made of the struggles Caroline faces in raising Pheobe, save the fight to get her educated at mainstream school. I did however feel that her handling of the relationship between Pheobe and her boyfriend Robert was sensitive and touching.
I have a cousin with Down's syndrome, and maybe this coloured the novel for me. I would not recommend it.