Always in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 29, 2017 Tanya rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: format-audiobook, 2017

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I had a bit of a tough time with this one. It is an interesting premise, but I don't think it gives traumatic brain injury the respect it is due--it's certainly not as though love is what will turn around a person's neurological damage. At first, when it was revealed that this was the cause of Cade's homelessness, I was curious to see how it would play out. Cade's experience once his true love found him again and got him on the rehabilitation pathway was much different than or experience and it I had a bit of a tough time with this one. It is an interesting premise, but I don't think it gives traumatic brain injury the respect it is due--it's certainly not as though love is what will turn around a person's neurological damage. At first, when it was revealed that this was the cause of Cade's homelessness, I was curious to see how it would play out. Cade's experience once his true love found him again and got him on the rehabilitation pathway was much different than or experience and it made the story less credible overall...and I had been willing to accept the direction this romance novel was heading. As far as other readers wishing for more background about how the brain injury occurred, well, often it's just not available as not all TBI individuals will remember the events at the time the injury occurred. So that didn't bother me as much as statements later such as him being fine getting treatment from a highly renown French neurologist who would see him every two weeks. More likely it would be a neuropsychologist or some other rehab specialists seeing him not a neurologist for those frequent follow up visits.

In my experience as a caregiver of a child with a brain injury, friends disappeared and others were in denial that such an injury could turn our lives upside down. And to think that this couple could just pick up and go to Normandy post-marriage without creating more confusion and executive functioning difficulties for him is extremely hopeful when he couldn't originally find the resources to not live on the streets and now he needed to learn a new language. To declare at the end that he just did things a little slower undermines the actual difficulties of brain injury and how it can create increased anxiety, anger, or depression among other symptoms as well as slower cognitive processing and short term memory issues and possibly less tolerance for noise/chaos.

I just found the story unbelievable overall, but I found the writing style was appealing to me. ...more

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