Still Alice in Play Book Tag

Apr 26, 2013 Book Concierge rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite, tear-jerker, own, contemporary-fiction, family, medicine, literary-fiction, love, concierge, strong-women

Book on CD read by the author.
5***** and a ❤

Alice Howland, Ph.D., professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Harvard University, wife and mother, begins to notice that she is forgetting things. No, not just where she put her keys, but words and thoughts and directions. Still, when she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease she is stunned.

The brilliance of Genova’s book is that she writes from Alice’s perspective. The reader experiences the slow decline as one daily function after anot Book on CD read by the author.
5***** and a ❤

Alice Howland, Ph.D., professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Harvard University, wife and mother, begins to notice that she is forgetting things. No, not just where she put her keys, but words and thoughts and directions. Still, when she’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease she is stunned.

The brilliance of Genova’s book is that she writes from Alice’s perspective. The reader experiences the slow decline as one daily function after another becomes challenging, difficult and even impossible to perform. The last third of the book is particularly poignant.

I had a very hard time with this book. My mother is in the final stages of this terrible disease. She is no longer mobile. She cannot speak and does not recognize any of her family or friends. She is just a physical shell of a person, the woman she was either locked away or perhaps completely lost to us and to herself.

Several years ago my brothers and I arranged a celebration for our parents’ 60th wedding anniversary at the assisted living facility where they then lived. Mother was still mobile and speaking (though not making much sense). She enjoyed the music and the food and the celebration. Several of her long-time friends came. One, Maria, approached me when she arrived and asked if my mother still recognized me. I said yes – but I realized suddenly that this was the first visit where she had failed to call me by the pet name she’d always used for me. Just before Maria left the party, she came up to me again and said, “Your mother recognizes love.” I took a wonderful picture of Maria and my mother at that gathering, and last year when Maria published her memoir she included that photo in her book along with several pages describing what my Mother meant to her and other young women in the community. Yes, my mother recognizes love, and I am especially glad that so many other people recognize HER love for them.

One final word about the audio version of this book. Had I been rating this based on the audio performance I would have given it only 3-stars. How I wish a professional voice-over artist had been hired to do the reading! Genova clearly believes strongly in the work and the message, but she reads with the same inflection throughout. So it is difficult to follow conversations at times because the listener cannot effectively tell which character is speaking. This is especially true early in the book when Alice isn’t so severely impaired, and her use of language matches the other speakers.

UPDATE 12Aug13
Reread this book in one day, in preparation for my F2F book club meeting. I got as much if not more out of it on this second reading. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Jan 01, 2016 Kristel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio

This was a heart wrenching story of what life with Alzheimer's can be. I think the author did an excellent job of showing this through the story of Alice. ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Feb 10, 2015 Karen rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, kindle-b

This novel is a very realistic portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease but the writing lacks emotional detail, leaving the reader detached from the characters. When Alice Howland, a 50 year old cognitive psychology professor at Harvard with three children and a happy marriage is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s her world is shattered. A woman who takes pride in her work and family must deal with the reality that soon she will not only lose the ability to work but will also lose the ability to ide ...more

1 like · Like · see review

May 30, 2013 Kristal rated it liked it

Shelves: 2013-reads, reviewed, family-dynamics, library, alzheimers-disease, dementia

I thought that since my own father has dementia, that this would be a good time to read this book. And maybe it did, but it was a raw kind of hurt. When I sit at the nursing home now and try to communicate with him, there are all kinds of thoughts running through my head as which parts he is following and understanding and when he is somewhere that I can not reach.

This was a very moving story, concerning a well-educated woman, a Harvard professor as a matter of fact, named Alice. Her 'senior' m ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 10, 2016 Margaret rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This story of the devastation of Alzheimer's is made even more powerful by the author's choice to make the victim an unusually intelligent and competent woman, and then choosing to let that character narrate the story herself. This provides an unusual point of view, a very scary point of view.

It's obvious the author, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, knows what she's talking about. Her liberal use of facts, along with letting the reader witness Alice's deterioration first hand, makes this novel ...more

1 like · Like · see review