Audiobook Review: Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Book: 86/150

Rating: 5/5

Summary: Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

Thoughts: Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist and decided to branch out into the fiction world by writing Still Alice. I think this book could be a great tool for friends/families of those who have Alzheimers; it definitely opens your eyes and heart and will give you more empathy for those struggling with Alzheimers or Dementia. It does a great job of talking about the biology of the disease at a really high level but making it a completely human story.

This books gets a full 5 stars from me because I could not stop listening to it, and it provoked so much emotion in me. My heart hurt following Alice and her journey: her minor and significant memory lapses, frustrations, and forgetting her family. While the book is in third person it does a great job of getting inside Alice's head, often repeating phrases and giving a play by play of what is going on in Alice's mind.