I opened my eyes, crawled out of my blanket, and tried to taste my day. Today is the second day of my “lovely” winter vacation. Not as usual, I woke up at seven. “No school” I said happily. And later I ate my breakfast with fresh air around me.

After finishing my breakfast, I opened the book, “The memory keeper’s daughter” which is written by Kim Edwards. Soon I dropped into the story. Every plot in the story captures my mind and asked me not to stop reading it. Finally, I finished the book, but felt a little upset. There were a lot of conflicts of life in this story, and, of course, a lot of contradiction of humanity that I have never thought before.

The story is about a father, who is a doctor, told a lie to his wife that the little daughter of their twins died after she was born. But actually, their daughter didn’t die. In fact, the little girl is a patient of Down’s syndrome. Since he didn’t want his wife to feel sad,, he asked a nurse to send the baby to a special nursing home and tried to forget this terrible news. However, everything turned wrong after he did this. His wife couldn’t face the bad news that her daughter died, and soon changed to a different woman from the one that the doctor had known before. The family broke into pieces.

On the other side, the nurse was so kind that she couldn’t leave the baby in the nursing home alone. As a result, she decided to bring her up as her daughter. With no help, she tried her best to give the baby a warm home. Life was certainly hard, but they had wonderful life. The two families seem so different. The rich doctor ended up having a broken family because of a lie, while the poor single-parent mother worked very hard every moment, and enjoyed her life with her “daughter”. It’s just like a game that God played, one day the doctor bumped into the nurse. She told him “Though you escaped a lot of heartbroken memories, you lost a lot of joys at the same time…” 

The story ended here…

Suddenly, too many feelings stuffed my mind. I couldn’t explain. The contradiction and conflicts of humanity in the book made me think a lot. I tried to play the role in the story. If I was the father, what I would I do? Telling the truth? Or keeping the lie? If I was the mother, could I face the sadness? Or losing my mind like the mother in this story.

A white lie changed two families…

Tonight, I was sleepless.