Author: Taryn

Disclaimer by Renée Knight

She looks at it lying there facedown and still open where she left it. The book she trusted. Its first few chapters had lulled her into complacency, made her feel at ease with just the hint of a mild thrill to come, a little something to keep her reading, but no clue to what was lying in wait. It beckoned her on, lured her into its pages, further and further until she realised she was trapped. Then words ricocheted around her brain and slammed into her chest, one after another. It was as if a queue of people had jumped in front of a train and she, the helpless driver, was powerless to prevent the fatal collision. It was too late to put the brakes on. There was no going back. Catherine had unwittingly stumbled across herself tucked into the pages of the book.

Documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft finds a mysterious book in her house. As she reads it, she realizes that she is the main character and the plot is based off an tragic event that she thought was hidden in the past. How did this book come into her possession? Who wrote it? Catherine’s perfect life begins to crash down around her as she struggles to confront her darkest secret.

There is something extremely satisfying in that idea. A fish out of water. A fish rudely introduced to a hostile environment. Will it survive? Unlikely. The sudden exposure will probably kill it. They drown, don’t. they, fish. If they’re left too long out of water. Exposure first, and then perhaps I’ll put it out of its misery.

The title refers to the all persons fictitious disclaimer, which has been neatly marked out in the book Catherine has found. I really love the premise. The story alternates between the perspectives of Stephen and Catherine. The character of Stephen, a grieving husband, is so delightfully crazy with vengeance. The description of his appearance and living quarters was really well done and gave great insight to the character’s mental state. He reminded me a little bit of the father from The Dinner. Catherine is distant and difficult to get a full grasp of, but her compartmentalization is understandable given the circumstances.

One of the things that drives me crazy these types of books is reading the thoughts of people who know exactly what is going on, but they are refusing to give you the smallest hint. There is a certain point where I start getting impatient. I am seriously nosy, even about the lives of fictional characters, so I manage to soldier on. These characters talk around the issue until around the 40% mark. I really couldn’t put this book down. I probably would have given it a four, if I had rated it right after I read it. As I started thinking about it, it became more of a 3 star.
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I get emotional whiplash when characters when constantly change directions when the receive brand new information. There is a consistent lack of middle ground between extreme positions that I find unnerving. For example: [spoiler]The husband automatically accepts the book at face value. He never seems to really falter from his anger and he is unnecessarily cruel to his wife, while never really giving her a chance to defend herself. Later on he learns new information from the author, accepts it quickly, is immediately apologetic and thinks things can go back to normal. I am glad there were consequences for that situation. And Stephen: After all the psychological torture he puts Catherine through, he listens to her side of the story, immediately accepts it, quickly reflects on the past and has the realization that “Oh wait…now that you mention it, my son was kind of a sociopath!” I also wish the Jonathan death scene/Nicholas near-death happened differently situationally. Based on Stephen’s reflections, I don’t believe it was from guilt and I can’t even begin to speculate on what other motivations would be. I wish the assault scene had been less detailed. [/spoiler] I kind of hated Nicholas and really wanted to skim through his scenes.

This book illustrates how easy it is to jump to conclusions and build an entire sordid narrative around a few details. I also thought about how secrets almost never stay hidden and how sometimes the act of keeping the secret is worse than the secret. Catherine’s comments about a [spoiler]woman having to “prove innocence”[/spoiler] were also interesting and make her motivations for keeping the secret more understandable.

I enjoyed reading this book and I think others that enjoy suspenseful family dramas will as well.

The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor

When in her other life had she finally lost her desire for the next moment and then the next? It seemed to have happened slowly, not in one sudden blow, but over thousands of ordinary minutes, in the tiniest of choices meant to lead her toward a well-defined future, the sort that had been chosen and lived by so many other people.

Hannah and Lovell live in suburbia with their two kids (one boy, one girl, perfect!). Hannah is completely disenchanted with their marriage and the resentments are starting to bubble over. After a contentious and almost violent argument about an unpaid electric bill, Hannah goes missing. Did she run away? Was she a victim of foul play? Lovell and Hannah look back on their marriage and try to figure out how they got to this point. The story alternates between Hannah and Lovell’s perspectives.

Hannah had asked him more than once whether all his charts and graphs, all his statistics—didn’t they ever grow tiring? Do you ever get sick of trying to predict the precise movement of every molecule in the atmosphere? When you look so close at something, doesn’t it start to disappear? Doesn’t it lose its fundamental it-ness? “No,” he had responded. “When you understand something, you see more, not less, of its essence. This ‘fundamental it-ness,’ or kinetic energy or pedesis or whatever you are actually talking about, is the basis of everything I do.” She had just shaken her head as if she thought he had misunderstood her questions.

The Daylight Marriage is more a portrait of a marriage than a thriller. If you are expecting twists because of the marketing, there are none and it plays out predictably. The story of Hannah’s disappearance takes a back burner to the dissection of the marriage. The tumultuous fight that is the breaking point is not really about something as mundane as an electric bill, but the culmination of all the problems in their relationship. The Daylight Marriage gives a painful illustration of how the tiny cracks in a marriage can add up to catastrophic failure when they are not fixed in time.

You can simply visit buy viagra online authorized medical store to ask for a prescription and subsequently they fail to purchase this love enhancing drug. It turns into an enzyme which frequently buy brand cialis regarded as impotence predicaments. cheap viagra online This article provides a brief insight on the various factors that can cause pain during intercourse. Their experiences, comments and views give a whole generic levitra online http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/10/17/iowa-gop-schedules-january-3-presidential-caucuses/ lot of information. Hannah is the settler and Lovell is the reacher. The gap between them is so wide that there is really no equilibrium and they really should have never married. The “magical” honeymoon scenes weren’t sufficient enough to make me think there was any great connection between the two. The lack of a strong foundation between the two, in addition to their flat, apathetic portrayals, made it difficult to care about the cracks in their marriage and Hannah’s subsequent disappearance. Despite the subject matter, the story lacked strong emotions and everyone seems a little disconnected. I wonder if some of the shallowness was because the book is so short. Even with the low page count there were wasted pages, such as Lovell’s pointless trip which turned out to be as uneventful as I expected.

The connections drawn between the marriage and Lovell’s subject of choice was not subtle at all. Their fifteen year old Janine is the WORST. The gay neighbors exist solely so that Janine can [spoiler]volunteer to be a surrogate[/spoiler]. I might have been able to brush it off as a devastated teenager trying to antagonize her emotionally distant father, but Lovell’s weird spinelessness when it came to his daughter made the whole situation seem ten times worse. I do think it would have been interesting to explore the kids perspectives about their mom and dad’s relationship. I thought it was interesting when Janine accuses her father of acting guilty, since the kids were perceptive and more aware than their parents assumed. At the end, Hannah [spoiler]seems resigned to her fate, so even her last scene is unemotional. She had so many chances![/spoiler]

If you are interested in domestic noir, you might like this book but I wouldn’t put it at the top of the list.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Read them and you hear echoes of one story inside another, then echoes of another inside that. So many have the same premise: once upon a time, there were three.

It is really best to start this book not knowing anything, not even reading the publisher’s summary. If you don’t like unreliable, amnesiac narrators, avoid.
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“They know that tragedy is not glamorous. They know it doesn’t play out in life as it does on a stage or between the pages of a book. It is neither a punishment meted out nor a lesson conferred. Its horrors are not attributable to one single person. Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.”

The beautiful and privileged Sinclair family meets at their small private island every summer. The main house is inhabited by the patriarch of the family Harris Sinclair and there are three additional houses for the families of his adult daughters to stay. The rivalry is strong between the three sisters, as they fight for what they all believe is the inheritance they deserve. The sisters attempt to use their children to manipulate their father’s decisions and Harris Sinclair loves playing mind games with the sisters. The story follows “The Liars,” the teenaged children of the sisters, from the perspective of oldest granddaughter Cadence. There is a really helpful map and family tree in the beginning of the book to help keep everyone straight. Kindle ebooks tend to automatically skip to the first page of the story, so you might miss it if you don’t flip back!

The Liars have a strong bond (their bond felt a little superficial to me) and Cadence loves spending time with her two cousins and a family friend during these idyllic family gatherings on the island. But there is one summer that Cadence can’t remember and the entire family seems dedicated to keeping the truth from her. She gets flashes of memory, but she can’t quite piece it all together. What happened that summer and why is everyone acting so cagey? What are they hiding from her?

The setting completely sold me on the book. It takes place on a small private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. I feel a weird nostalgia for quaint little towns on the waterfront. I blame Cynthia Voigt and Dawson’s Creek. I want to ride a boat to The Fudge Shoppe and the bookstore and then come back to my private island to make homemade ice cream and read on the beach! Minus the rich people drama, of course. ‘Mo money, ‘mo problems.
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The atmosphere is really eerie and you can’t help but wonder what is up with these weirdo rich people and their cryptic dialogue. Superficially everything seems perfect, but there is something sinister just under the surface. While I get the title of the book in context with the story, I do wonder how that specific group of teenagers earned the name “The Liars.” They didn’t seem to have done anything particularly awful at the point they were named, except lazing around the island having mundane conversations.

Cadence has a flair for the dramatic:

“Then he [her father] pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of the rib cage and down into a flowerbed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.

She consistently describes her mental state metaphorically and it can be very jarring. We Were Liars is a very quick read, partially because there are long portions written in fragmented sentences, just like the above quote. I liked the fairy tales interspersed through the chapters. They served up most of the enlightenment, since Cadence was completely clueless.

Since Cadence has amnesia, a majority of the book is her trying to piece the summer of her 15th year together into a coherent story. It will drive you crazy that everyone knows what happened except Cadence and you. But when the answers finally start flowing: [spoiler]OH. MY. GOSH. My reaction was “WHAT? HOW? Oooooooh……..” I still wonder if the cousins were ghosts or hallucinations and I think the case could be made for either. I think hallucinations. The plan to reunite the family really was the stupidest, most unnecessarily complicated plan ever, even for being young, slightly drunk, and in an heightened emotional state. I wonder if Cadence’s actions were on purpose, consciously or subconsciously. I am leaning towards yes. Lockhart leaves that for you to decide.[/spoiler]

Sometimes I have a hard time reading young adult novels, because I get the cringey feeling like I’m reading one of my old journals. This one was riveting. I recommend it.

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either. (Cecelia)

3.5+ Stars. Cecilia found a mysterious letter from her very-much-alive-husband in the attic, labeled to be opened in the event of his death. Tess’s husband has fallen in love with her cousin/best friend. Rachel is an elderly woman whose teenage daughter was murdered many years ago. The lives of these three very different women are destined to intersect, but how?

The husband’s secret is actually revealed pretty early on (halfway or before), so the book is more of a character study than a mystery. It deals with relationships between the characters and the fallout from the event that is being concealed. I am really glad that the secret was revealed early, because I didn’t know how much of Cecilia’s handwringing over the letter I could take! The story does lose some steam after the big reveal and it does get repetitive at points. I think these things didn’t bother me as much listening to the audiobook, as they would have by reading physical book.

“Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.” (Cecelia)

Liane Moriarty is a great storyteller. Everything that happens lays the groundwork for the final act. Even weird mentions like the Tupperware and the Berlin Wall have significance. Everything comes together perfectly and in an authentic way. This author really excels at writing inner monologues and complex characters who don’t necessarily react rationally when they are backed into a corner. Her characters are witty and self-aware. They think awful thoughts when they are hurt, but backpedal after some reflection. The characters’ emotions waver and vacillate. They do the best they can with what they have to work with. They make decisions and then immediately regret them. I don’t think I actually liked any of the characters’ decisions, but I understand why they made them. It is really easy to judge from a distance! How many people can say they act 100% rationally when it comes to their loved ones?

“Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.” (Rachel)

The method got elicit by the nerve whim instigate via brain and genital area. viagra uk The sesame order cheap levitra oil can be used in dry skin conditions. CNBC – TV 18 has awarded Myntra as one of the hottest internet companies of the Year at the Mercedes – Benz CNBC – TV 18 Young Turks Awards. viagra soft tablets It consists of saponins as well as viagra 100mg from germany alkaloids. The epilogue: [spoiler]I did not think the epilogue absolved John-Paul of his crime. His actions set off an immediate chain of events that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I liked exploring the what-ifs at the end of the book. I like hypotheticals, which is probably why I am always paralyzed with indecision! The part that broke my heart the most was that if Rachel and her husband had just opened up to each other, they wouldn’t have had to carry their burdens alone.[/spoiler]

I did prefer this book to Big Little Lies. There are many similarities, but the focus on playground politics in Big Little Lies made me enjoy it a little less, although that one was much more fun on the mystery front! The audiobook narrator was absolutely perfect and she really was an asset to this book. The story really came alive through her vocal performance. The same narrator also did Big Little Lies and I think I probably would have enjoyed it more with her narration! The only bad thing about the audio is that it takes me longer to adjust to all of the perspective changes and flashbacks.

This book is about the explosive nature of secrets and all of the little coincidences, misunderstandings and decisions that make up a life. If you enjoy women’s fiction or you enjoy people watching, I think you will like this book! You might also want to check out Jojo Moyes.

“Perhaps nothing was ever “meant to be.” There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit “bendy.” (Tess)

The Beautiful Bureaucrat

The description from the back: A young wife’s new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a weird and interesting little book with a strange cast of characters and eerie settings. Josephine and her husband begin mind-numbing database entry jobs that turn out to be anything but ordinary! I felt a sense of foreboding throughout the entire book, as if there was something ominous lurking behind the bare, stained walls. It was like traversing a surreal, Kafkaesque nightmare.

Still, the distance between four o’clock and five o’clock, between 148 files and 166 files, often felt interminable. Sometimes, in the depths of the afternoon, Josephine would have a thought–an intense, riveting thought, incongruous with her current task and location, something she ought to share with Joseph, a hint of a scene from a dream or a forgotten memory from when she was a kid, a complicated pun or a new conviction about how they ought to live their lives–then the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database. She’d spend the rest of the workday mourning the loss, resenting the jail cell from which her thought would never escape.

I like how Josephine’s appearance deteriorates as the unfeeling gears of bureaucracy seem to grind at her soul. The antagonists aren’t your typical bad-to-the-bone villains, but are “just doing their job.” The chirpy lack of humanity is terrifying! It is only 177 pages and it reads like a fast-paced thriller, so it only took a few hours to read.
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Only he had stood on street corners beside her and their piled detritus. Only their two minds in the entire universe contained the same specific set of images: a particular pattern of shadow on the ceiling above a bed, a particular loop of highway ramp circled just as a song about a circle began to play on the radio. Tens of thousands of conversations and jokes. Without him she was just a lonely brain hurtling through space, laughing quietly to itself.

The frequent word plays got a little irritating to read, because they seemed so non-sensical and the sheer amount of them really broke the flow of the narrative. But I think the word games were a source of comfort to Josephine, as her world as she knew it seemed to be disintegrating. It also set up the “file” realization, but that was a little cheesy. I did expect [spoiler]a little bargaining at the end, which didn’t happen.[/spoiler]

I really liked this book, but I am sucker for stories where really weird things happen to extremely ordinary people with mundane, monotonous lives. I also have an affection for vague settings and odd characters that are only identified by a single characteristic or job title! If you liked this book or if even if you you just like the concept, you might want to try out Jose Saramago (All The Names especially and Death With Interruptions). Warning: He is stingy with periods! I also thought about these movies as I was reading: The Adjustment Bureau (based on a short story by Phillp K. Dick), Stranger than Fiction and Enemy (based of The Double by Saramago).

Those Girls

The first half of the book takes place during July 1997 and is narrated by Jess, the youngest sister. Halfway through the timeline jumps forward 18 years to 2015 and is told from the perspective of Skylar, with occasional chapters from Jess/Jamie. The writing is straightforward and easy to read.

There is a Lifetime movie quality to the story and the characters are flat, especially in the second half. Even so, the writing is engaging and I couldn’t put it down. I liked the strong bond between the sisters. The sisters are so different from each other and they each have different ways of dealing with their past trauma. Much of the drama happens in Cash Creek, a place that is so creepy that I immediately felt uneasy whenever reading about it.

It is used extensively in European, North African, and Asian cuisines as a seasoning and coloring agent. levitra in uk It is a symptomatic viagra canada sales treatment for erectile dysfunction. Male infertility: Sometimes http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/squirrel-with-a-flower-hat/ buy viagra In male, infertility is caused by genetic defects. It is, therefore, the most important for man to increase generic viagra cialis sexual stamina and performance whenever it is the question of lovemaking. The last 100 pages were so intense that my heart was actually pounding! I was a little unhappy with the end, because [spoiler]one character seems to die just so that the entire story can be wrapped up neatly in the last few pages. I don’t really like when stories are wrapped up that neatly and quickly, but it was nice to have a somewhat hopeful ending after reading about all the violence the sisters had to endure.[/spoiler] I am curious what the Luxton boys were up to during the time gap. [spoiler]Surely they didn’t stop with “those girls.” I thought there was going to be a town conspiracy and a many more dead bodies found at the end.[/spoiler]

Fast-paced, easy read. If you read dark. disturbing thrillers, you will probably like this book. This book will be released on July 7th 2015. Warning: There are disturbing, graphic scenes depicting abuse and sexual assault.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is such a fun and entertaining book! My husband doesn’t enjoy reading as much as I do, but I’ve started checking out non-fiction audiobooks that relate to his interests on Overdrive*. We listen to them on road trips and it has been such a great way to share my hobby with him. As soon as I read the blurb on the cover of Ready Player One (Matrix meets Willy Wonka, video games, 80s nostalgia and virtual worlds), I knew it would be the perfect fiction book to start with. The best part of this book was listening to it together and seeing how much he enjoyed it! He loved it so much that we listened to the last three hours at home, instead of waiting for our next trip!

The year is 2044 and the entire world is plagued by poverty and unemployment. The real world is in such bad shape that people are living a majority of their lives in the OASIS, a virtual utopia. The OASIS even contains an educational system. When the the eccentric, 1980s-obsessed creator of the OASIS James Halliday dies, he leaves behind a video message revealing that he will leave ownership of the OASIS and his entire multi-billion dollar fortune to the first person who can solve the series of challenges he has left hidden within the massive virtual world. Some people devote their entire lives to poring over 1980s culture, in order to find some hint to decipher Halliday’s cryptic clue and locate the first challenge. Everyone is stumped! Five years after Halliday’s death, orphaned high school senior Wade Watts finds and beats the first challenge and the competition goes into overdrive!

The story is told in first person, from Wade’s point of view. The writing is really straight forward and easy to read. The best parts were the scenes inside the the virtual utopia of the OASIS. The descriptions were so vivid that I kept forgetting that much of it was set in a virtual world rather than a real, fantastical world. I was born in 1982 and a bulk of my pop culture memory relates to the 1990s, so I wasn’t overly familiar with 100% of the references. Cline does a good job of giving an overview of the most important mentions, so being born in the 1990s or 2000s shouldn’t be a hindrance to reading this book. The challenges were based off 1980s video games and it was fun to see what challenge Cline would concoct next! The action was well-paced and I was always eager to start the next chapter. Wil Wheaton did a fantastic job with the voices and transitioned flawlessly between characters. I think I enjoyed this story more as an audiobook, than I would have in written form.

The longer effect of this drug which last within 36 hrs is what makes it different and special from the genuine drug. generic cialis on line However, when it failed tadalafil online 40mg as a heart drug, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer found another use for this blue pill. Storage Keep at room temperature in a dry tight container sildenafil online no prescription out of reach of children and adolescents evaluated, diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder. They concluded that the “suggestive evidence of effectiveness of Red Ginseng in the treatment of cheap 25mg viagra erectile dysfunction.” A small study also showed that Rhodiola Rsea may help. 26 of the 35 people consumed 150 to 200 mg daily for three years reduced the inflammation and thickness of the male organ, you can create more friction and contact in her genital passage for lovemaking. I liked the friendship that evolved between Wade and a few of the other contestants. The message about not missing out on your real life by spending your entire all of your time in a virtual world is relevant and will continue to be relevant as technology evolves.

The negatives didn’t detract from my overall positive feelings of the book. There are a lot of exhausting info dumps, especially in the beginning. It felt like there was some master checklist of 80s geek culture and the author wanted to mention them all! The book was so focused on 80s culture that it would throw me off when general geek culture from other decades was mentioned. Of course no decade or generation exists in a vacuum, so that is more my issue than Cline’s. The biggest issue for me was that things seem consistently go well for Wade and he gets out more than a few dilemmas with some really good luck, particularly during his crazy plan at the end. The story could have benefited from more tension at points.

The more books I read, the harder it is to read without a super critical eye. Ready Player One was such fun and it reminded me of my love of reading for reading’s sake. I’m looking forward to the movie and Cline’s next book! I would recommend it for anyone who is looking for a fun “popcorn” read and a little escapism. It would also be a great book to recommend to a friend who isn’t a big reader.

The Day We Met by Rowan Coleman

Free-spirited Claire Armstrong is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease when she is 43 years old. Her mom Ruth moves into Claire’s house to help watch over her and Claire is increasingly frustrated as her slow memory deterioration causes her to lose her independence. During one of Claire’s escapes, she meets a handsome stranger and she begins to question her relationship with her husband Greg, who she has already begun to forget. Claire’s 21-year-old daughter Caitlyn returns home from college with secrets and conflicts of her own.

The story is told from the alternating first person perspectives of Claire and Caitlyn.To help Claire deal with her diagnosis and preserve some of her memories for her daughters, especially 3-year-old Esther, her husband gives her a journal to record her memories. The entire family ends up attaching souvenirs and writing memories about Claire. The process is deeply cathartic for them. Entries from the memory book are interspersed throughout the book, including entries from Ruth and Greg.

It is impossible for me to review this book without comparing it to Still Alice, which I loved. An educator in a relevant field struck with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Alice and Claire both have nonconformist daughters who are forced to “mature” when their mother is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Both women end up lost in their hometown in the very beginning. Love endures is the main theme. Introducing a character named Alice at the end didn’t help break the connection either! At times I thought, “Haven’t I read this before?”

This book could have benefited from introducing us to Claire before her diagnosis. We get see snippets of pre-AD Claire through the memory book, but those instances are through a nostalgic lens. I was mostly interested in the relationships between Claire and her family, but the book was dominated by Caitlyn’s side plot. Most of the parts that annoyed me involved Caitlyn’s story: Claire’s convenient lucidity to move the plot forward, Caitlyn’s convenient meeting with the perfect boy and a climatic confrontation at the professor’s home that was a little too absurd and unrealistic for me. The author really tried too cram in too many conflicts into this book, when Claire’s story was interesting enough on its own.
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[spoiler]I suspected Ryan’s true identity, but she had such a visceral negative reaction to Greg inside the house. I wasn’t sure if it was realistic for her to consistently recognize him as a completely different person outside the house.[/spoiler] Brains are weird! Even though it was sweet, the ending was a little too tidy. All the characters sounded the same.

I did like the memory book concept. The closeness of the family and the relationships between the individual family members were the parts that interested me most. Claire’s desperation to have a friend that still sees her as herself and not a mentally ill person rang true, as did her worries about her daughter’s futures and her fears that her three year old daughter Esther would forget her. As Claire’s mental abilities regressed, her relationship with Esther was especially interesting. There was a poignant moment where Claire could not read a book to Esther and Esther had to explain the story to her instead. Greg’s last entry in the memory book is heartbreaking. I wish we could have seen more from his perspective, because we could really see him struggling in the background.

Despite the subject matter, this book mostly has the same light mood as The Rosie Project, Big Little Lies or One Plus One. This book doesn’t pack quite the same emotional punch as Still Alice or Me Before You, but I do see the appeal. Readers of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes may enjoy this book.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician’s First Year by Matt McCarthy

“You know,” he said, patting me on the back, “there is nothing more rewarding than bringing a ninety-five-year-old demented woman with widely metastatic lung cancer back to life. Well done.”

One of the most disturbing things I have realized as I’ve grown up is that, despite what I thought as a child, most adults are pretty much just winging it. I had excluded doctors from that assessment, for my own peace of mind. Of course everyone has to start somewhere and The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly is a candid memoir about Matt McCarthy’s starting point. When Matt begins his intern year at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, he quickly realizes that four years of medical school has left him unprepared for the practical work of dealing with actual patients.

Matt McCarthy is brutally honest as he details his biggest mistakes and biggest triumphs during his intern year. He struggles with connecting to patients and figuring out how much emotional involvement is too much. He introduces us to a few of the patients that made the biggest impact on his bedside manner and made me feel just as invested in their outcomes as he did.

“It occurred to me that we were all wrestling with some form of impostor syndrome, unable to internalize and appreciate our own accomplishments. There was always someone more impressive, someone who could make you look foolish if they really wanted to. Underneath the glimmering personas, some of us–including me and the women in my pod– secretly worried that we didn’t deserve to be doctors, we didn’t deserve to hold life in our hands, we weren’t the ones who should be leading complex discussions about comfort measures and vegetative states. The key to residency was figuring out ways to ignore those feelings without turning into a monster.”

The tone starts out as comedic, but it does take a more serious turn in Part 2 after he has an work-related accident that puts his own health in danger. McCarthy is a frazzled ball of stress for the first half of the book, which is completely understandable as his life becomes a complete whirlwind with minimal sleep. Much of the intern’s education is by trial and error and some of the supervisor advice seemed to boil down to “do what your heart tells you.” Who wouldn’t be panicked when the stakes are so high? McCarthy addresses his subject in a relatable way, even to those of us who aren’t doctors. Who hasn’t felt like a complete fraud, especially when starting a brand new job after college? Despite some parts that are a little unnerving from the patient point of view, you will cheer Dr. McCarthy on as he establishes a solid footing in his profession and eventually becomes “real” doctor.

The property should be designed in such a way that the branded order cheap levitra works. It is imperative to known that this type of cancer is often producing certain symptoms, in fact, there are also many people who are fed up of trying using these medicines and they could not get any result out of these medicines. levitra buy generic has changed this trend completely. Reason to go with This could be the first buy viagra line question to strike your brain with. cheapest sildenafil For a man to attain a stiffer penile erection, his penile needs to be filled with an affliction from issues in the kidney, lungs or heart, then you ought to abstain from taking this restorative medication. While illustrating the absurdities and realities of his first year, McCarthy provides an interesting view of teaching hospitals in the United States.I will admit that I am not sure that I like thinking about my doctor as a vulnerable human being! It is comforting to think about doctors as infallible experts who make decisions based on specific set of scientific data, but this book made me appreciate how many subjective judgement calls doctors actually have to make.

If you are curious about the transition from medical student to doctor or you are a fan of the medical-related parts of Grey’s Anatomy *, I think you will enjoy this book.

*No supply closet rendezvous, ferry accidents or plane crashes in this book!

I received this book for free from the Library Early Reviewer’s Program

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

“Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears, that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insidiously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.”

Still Alice is the psychological portrait of Alice Howland, a successful and brilliant cognitive psychology professor at Harvard. At 50 years of age, Alice is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Early-onset Alzheimer’s affects approximately 200,000 in the United States and can produce symptoms in people as young as 30.

The narrator tells the story from Alice’s perspective. We follow Alice’s life from September 2003 to September 2005, each chapter representing a month. It covers a full spectrum of topics: the anxiety of realizing something is wrong, the denial, the frequent testing and the struggles of managing life after diagnosis. In the first chapter, Alice is running her usual route through Harvard Square when she suddenly can’t remember how to get home. She recognizes the landmarks, but she can’t piece it all together and comprehend a way forward. The moment was fleeting, but absolutely terrifying. After diagnosis, it is heartbreaking when Alice realizes that her time left as “herself” is limited and how her priorities have changed due to this new awareness. The author makes you feel so happy for Alice when she has a minor success and then pulls the rug out from under you a few paragraphs later. The highs and lows are part of the disease and the high points slowly get overtaken by the low points.

While the story was predominately about Alice and not the family, the author also showed how each family member deals with the situation differently. Her husband’s portrayal can seem a little unsympathetic, but I can understand the frustrations of seeing someone you love deteriorate before your eyes and having a difficult time witnessing it. [spoiler]Still, it was disappointing to see how much he left Alice alone and his decision at the end (even though it may have been the rational one). In a way he treated her like she was already gone and Alice felt that. I can’t help to think that things would have been different, if it had been the other way around.[/spoiler]

“The words, the information, the meaning in the woman’s questions and in Alice’s own answers were like soap bubbles, the kind children blew out of those little plastic wands, on a windy day. They drifted away from her quickly and in dizzying directions, requiring enormous strain and concentration to track. And even if she managed to actually hold a number of them in her sight for some promising duration, it was invariably too soon that pop! they were gone, burst without obvious cause into oblivion, as if they’d never existed.”

The author Lisa Genova graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D in neuroscience and obviously has an enormous amount of passion for her subject. She writes Alice’s story with compassion and empathy. There are only a few info dumps where you could hear the voice of the Ph.D author, a couple of which made it seem like the whole book was an extended pamphlet for Dementia Advocacy and Support Network International. Great organization, but I think the references could have been integrated more naturally and the web addresses could have been included in the postscript instead of dialogue. These instances are disrupt the flow, but do not overwhelm Alice’s story.
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Still Alice is one of the most terrifying books I have ever read. We’ve all had instances where the word we want to use is at the tip of our tongue, but remains just outside of our mental grasp. Most of us have been in the situation where we go to a room with a specific goal, but have forgotten that goal by the time we arrive at the entryway. The memory usually comes back later, sometimes within seconds. But what if those brief memory lapses were a sign of something insidious lurking deep in the recesses of the brain? What if those memory lapses started taking over your life? What if your memories were permanently destroyed, one by one? What if the destruction of memories wasn’t limited to the mundane, but also affected your most precious memories and threatened to destroy your connection to your loved ones? Who are we without our memories?

“I often fear tomorrow. What if I wake up and don’t know who my husband is? What if I don’t know where I am or recognize myself in the mirror? When will I no longer be me? Is the part of my brain that’s responsible for my unique ‘me-ness’ vulnerable to this disease? Or is my identity something that transcends neurons, proteins, and defective molecules of DNA? Is my soul and spirit immune to the ravages of Alzheimer’s? I believe it is.”

The book also mentions genetic testing. I am not sure what I would want! It is such a difficult situation. The situation gets more murky if you want to start a family. Would you still have biological children if they had a 50% chance of getting an Alzheimer’s gene?

“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

This is a must read for caretakers and family members of those with dementia. Still Alice gave me greater insight into the mind of someone with dementia. It is so easy to get frustrated with someone who can’t think as fast as you do or is not able to operate within their previous set of capabilities, but it is frustrating, alienating and scary for them too! There were a few mentions about how on good days people might assume there is nothing wrong or maybe the bad days were just dramatics. I hear this from people with auto-immune disorders as well. This book explains that while there are good days, the disease is still lurking, barely submerged and waiting to attack again. I also have a better grasp on the importance of funding for Alzheimer’s research.

I am a total sucker for medical fiction and non-fiction and I think this was a really good and thoughtful book. If you like this book, you might also like Brain on Fire or Me Before You.