The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Hmm. This book was okay. Which I really feel like is damning with faint praise when it comes from a reader like me, who has a high tolerance for the type of “higher brow” chick lit that gets sold on the front table of airport bookstores. There's the potential for an interesting plot, but that really gets bungled by the fact that Edwards' characters all turn out to be martyrs, and not even martyrs who are all that different from one another. And I guess I don't really believe in martyrs who don't have martyr complexes, so I ended up not feeling a ton (or a tiny bit) of sympathy for the pathos they all endure. There were parts that were compelling, but whenever I finish a book mostly out of obligation (and the desperate, irrational hope that things will turn awesome in the last 100 pages), I feel like that's a bad sign. I guess that means I have a book-finishing-martyr-complex.