Sarah B. (caffeinegirl) reviewed on 7/14/2012 + 114 more book reviews

I did not enjoy this book as much as I hoped. I agree with the reviewer who said that this book felt impersonal, partly because of the third-person narration and partly because of the ratio of facts about Alzheimer's to character development. I think this book would be a great way to learn about the disease for someone who is faced with a diagnosis of EOA in the family. As a novel, though, it was not good. I struggled to like Alice, and I was disappointed that Genova chose to make her a high-prestige world-renowned expert in linguistics professor at Harvard (*cough* Mary Sue *cough*). I wish she could have been a more realistic character, so maybe I could have related to her more. Was Genova thinking that it's more of a tragedy when a really smart person loses her memory than when it happens to an average woman? Controversial idea. Anyway, the details of the memory tests got to me, and I skipped about 50 pages halfway through. I managed to hang in there, waiting to find out if Alice was going to follow through on her instructions to herself, which provided most of the dramatic tension in the book. In the future, I think people who have Ph.D.s in neuroscience from Harvard (so much name-dropping) should leave the fiction to talented authors.

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