Norah is pregnant with twins and goes into labor on a freezing cold and snowy night and David,
her husband, drives her to the doctor’s office he works at and delivers his own children, with the
help of the nurse Caroline. A baby boy is born first. Then, a baby girl with Down’s Syndrome.
Before Norah is even awake, David hands the second child off to Caroline to take her away to a
home for children like her, but after arriving and see what this place is like, she could not do that.
Caroline takes the child in as her own. On her way back to the apartment she stops at a grocery
store to pick up food, and when she leaves she soon realizes her car will …show more content…
David loses himself in photography to cope with the shame he feels. He
perfects everything in his pictures because he can’t perfect what happens in his life.
“Photography is all about secrets... The secrets we all have and will never tell” (Edwards 201).
David hides his secrets in his photography instead of telling them out loud. David made the
largest impact on this story.
This story puts out the message that people always do what they believe is best for the
people they love. After reading this story, it helped me, as a reader, realize that people make
choices based off of what they think is helping, but their decision sometimes makes matters
worse. Also, reading about Phoebe’s life gave me new insights on how wonderful life is. If you
live life to the fullest you can never be unhappy. “But what goes wrong is not your fault. You
can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll
just end up missing the life you have”(Edwards 78). This quote stood out among all of the words
because made the realization that you should never just dwell on everything that goes wrong.
You do not always have control over everything. This story brought up how Phoebe had …show more content…
“He’d kept this silence
because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had
Jones 4
created hers”(Edwards 203). This quote shows the significance that all of the lying had caused
in this story. One lie caused another person to lie and they just go on deceiving each other.
Finally, the last thought this novel opened my eyes to was showing how every human being
deserves the life they are given and they are important. David made it seem like Phoebe’s life did
not matter because she was not as “perfect” as the rest. Phoebe’s life was just as important as any
other person’s life. This story made me realize many different morals.
This story kept me interested and always wanting to read more. This book changed my
way of thinking through many different actions the characters took and the inspiring quotes Kim
Edwards put into the story. I loved this book because it could be relatable to almost every reader.
Each person could find a different character to have something in common with. It always kept
me reading more with the suspense of never knowing when the secrets and lies would come