Still Alice - Lisa Genova

Still Alice

Lisa Genova

Simon & Schuster

At fifty, Alice is a respected cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a renowned expert in linguistics. Together with her husband, also a Harvard professor, they lead an idealistic life. They have three well-balanced children who look to be following their parents in becoming successful in their chosen fields.

This idealistic world starts to crumple when Alice begins to forget things. At first they are minor - a word just at the tip of her tongue. Nothing to worry about. But soon other more worrying signs start to emerge. She forgets the topic she is to lecture, misses an interstate conference she is to attend, and gets disorientated jogging a route she regularly takes in her neighbourhood. Although she knows there is something wrong, Alice's life and sense of herself is thrown into a spin when she learns she's suffering from Alzheimer's.

Through Alice's eyes, we see how the event takes a toll on each member of the family. Her husband, John struggles the most to accept her diagnosis. At times selfish and insensitive, he almost seems to be in denial of his wife's needs as he continues to make career plans that are clearly detrimental to Alice's condition.

It takes a lot of effort for anyone over the age of -say 30- to not become paranoid after reading this book. At one point I was convinced I may have early onset of the disease. The paranoia did not settle the further I travelled into the book.

Using a professor with a brilliant career as her protagonist, Genova has added extra poignancy to the narrative. The passages in the doctor's surgery are repeated to ad nauseam. Genova overestimates the reader's interest in wanting to learn to such detail about the treatments and the various trials or medication. What is interesting however, is the changes taking over Alice. The questions she sets herself daily and the deterioration in her answers as the disease takes hold, is a brilliant demonstration of the disease's devastating effects.

In the end, even as Alice forgets names and relationship of those around her, at her core, she remains the same. She is Still Alice.

And that my friend, is a good lesson for us all. 3 stars

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
Virago
'My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby's child, if I was anyone's'

Susan Trinder, 17, grew up in the slumps of London. An orphan, she is raised by petty thieves and pickpockets. Her life takes a sudden turn when Richard Rivers, a trickster, comes up with a plan to make them all rich.

Maud Lilley also 17, is an heiress kept in seclusion by her uncle in a large house outside of London. Set to inherit a large fortune upon marriage, she is easy prey for the likes of Rivers - who plans to marry, then commit her to a mental asylum. Sarah is to abet Rivers in his plan by installing herself as Maud's maid and chaperon to help win her over.

Simple.

A tale of betrayal and treachery, where nothing is ever as simple as it appear and no one is to be trusted. Dastardly gentlemen, unscrupulous villains, vulnerable girls in peril, and transgressive heroines, Fingersmith does not dissapoint on any level.

A thoroughly enjoyable read. 4 stars