Review: Still Alice by Lisa Geneova

Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Publisher: Pocket Books
Release Date: December 16, 2014
Book Format: Paperback
# of Pages: 400
Synopsis: (Taken from Goodreads)
In Lisa Genova's extraordinary New York Times bestselling novel, an accomplished professor diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease learns that her worth is comprised of more than her ability to remember.
Now a major motion picture from Sony Pictures Classics starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, and Kristen Stewart!

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old, she's a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life and her relationship with her family and the world forever.

At once beautiful and terrifying, Still Alice is a moving and vivid depiction of life with early-onset Alzheimer's disease that is as compelling as A Beautiful Mind and as unforgettable as Ordinary People.

 Meet The Author:

I'm a Harvard-trained Neuroscientist, a Meisner-trained actress, and an entirely untrained writer!

My first novel, STILL ALICE, winner of the 2008 Bronte Prize, nominated for 2010 Indies Choice Debut Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association, and winner of the 2011 Bexley Book of the Year Award spent over 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been translated into 25 languages and was chosen as one of the thirty titles for World Book Night 2013.

Originally self-published, I sold it out of the trunk of my car for almost a year before it was bought at auction by Simon & Schuster.

LEFT NEGLECTED, also a New York Times Bestseller, was a #1 Indie Next Pick, the Borders “Book You’ll Love” for January 2011, and the #4 Indie Reading Group Pick for summer 2011, and a Richard & Judy Book Club Pick.

LOVE ANTHONY, also a New York Times bestseller, is about autism. It was an October 2012 Indie Next pick and a People Magazine Great Read. USA Today calls it “beautifully written and poignant to the point of heartbreak.”

"After I read STILL ALICE I wanted to stand up and tell a train full of strangers, YOU HAVE TO GET THIS BOOK." - Beverly Beckham, Boston Sunday Globe

“Lisa Genova is the Michael Crichton of brain science. What she proved with STILL ALICE, she proves again with LEFT NEGLECTED. This is huge, powerful human drama at its elegant best."

-Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

www.lisagenova.com

My Review: 
I bought this book on my own and this is my honest opinion of it.

Before purchasing this book, I had no knowledge of the following it had. After seeing it for the first time I did a little research of my own and found that there was a new film starring Julianne Moore. I had heard that the movie was amazing and that Moore actually won an award for it, so I knew I just had to pick it up and read it.

Still Alice is about a middle aged women who is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. The novel goes on to describe Alice and her family's journey to deal with her disease. My first thought while reading this book was the fact that I felt Alice and John's relationship was a little distant, but only in parts. There are scenes in the book where I see the love that they have with each other, but there were other parts when I felt sad because they did not seem to be in the relationship as much as other times, but I guess that is just a given in relationships.

I had very few issues with this book, but there were certainly some. My only big problem was the fact that Alice was described as having black hair in the book, but in the movie she is a red head. I am not sure whose decision that was but it was not a very appealing one especially to those who have read the book before seeing the movie.

One of the reasons I loved this book was the amount of emotion that filled the pages of Still Alice. It did not matter if it was negative or positive emotion any or all of it made the book. There was a point in the book when Alice was upset about something with her disease, and instead of comforting her John just went off to work. We can see there that maybe her disease is affecting him in different ways than it is her. There was also a point in the book when John and Alice were on the drive home from one of her appointments and he silently cried the whole way home. That showed that he might have hard time showing the emotion and the hurt he felt but he did have it.

Overall, I made a good decision on buying this book because I could not put it down. I read it from dusk until dawn. I searched everywhere for a book light just so I could read even after the lights had been shut off in my house. This was an amazing read and I would recommend it to everyone and anyone.