Left Neglected

When I first read Still Alice I couldn't wait for Lisa Genova's sophmore book to come out. Sadly, I find this book not as gripping as Still Alice, though it's along the same track. Genova certainly uses her Harvard degree to write complex novels on nuerosciene related issues.Spoiler alert:I will say this- Genova is an excellent writer. She writes in a very readable way, and very thouroughly develops her main characters. Sarah Nickerson is nothing is not complex. The story is relatable to so many people, especially women- but not just men and women. We race through our lives driven to suceed but sometimes find, usually by accident that our successful lives are being measured on the wrong stick. An unfortunate accident leaves Sarah to face these truths that change her life forever.There are some real life lessons to heed in Genova's book.What I didn't like were several things. First of all this book is MORE than 100 pages to long. About 120 pages, and it's only a 326 page book. The middle section becomes challenging. Sarah's character is negative and the book drones on for hundreds of pages without any human growth. Now, I understand the negativity. Sarah has been handicapped and obviously that's not something that someone can easily swallow. However, there is some accute denial (also natural) that makes the negativity a conflict though.Even though all is righted in the end I feel that Sarah is unfair to her mother. I also feel like Sarah is a little hypocritical. She's very judgemental at the start, but even after her accident she stays that way. I get it- trust me- but still. It's over the top. Sarah is in the rat race, and trying to keep up with the Joneses- but it's TOO much. Sarah is so arrogant, and materialistic that I find it very distracting and it diminishes her character. Honestly, I started to really feel like it was just a way for Genova to add pages to the book, and ramble on about Harvard and Boston and how busy Bostonians are as if people elsewhere in the country aren't busy. It was too smug, and again - at times just seemed to be the author more than Sarah.The accident occurs on page 65, but I don't believe Sarah has any humbling moments until page 200. As Sarah starts to see that she doesn't want the fast paced life she tries to get her husband to envision a life elsewhere. She'd had the clarity of the accident to guide her to this. However, pre-accident she would have never understood this. Yet, even though he husband is now supporting her, but also acting as a caregiver she is very frustrated and mad when he doesn't jump on the band wagon. Sarah really has to work hard to appreciate her mother. She was neglected by her mother as a child- but in many ways she has neglected her own children. And even after the accident she isn't overly involved with her kids. She's still very self-centered. I honestly grew tired of reading page after page about their awesome coffee maker, and the shoes she has, and her nice clothes, and the fact that they have five remote controls.....Even after the accident Sarah's tone and materialism is still very present. It's a turn off. A job falls into her lap (Suprise!) but she expects her husband just to take a leap of faith without having a job for him. Poor Bob! He's working so hard to keep the family afloat, he's helping her do daily functions, all while barely holding onto a job, and he's clearly the more nurturing parent.In the end I absolutely rooter for Sarah, but she's not someone I would be friends with. I didn't mind her internal struggle, and at times you do feel she's a great mother. She has a great marriage with Bob. But, she's a little selfish and I just wish her accident has humbled her more than it did. I think more than just discovering you want a faster paced life you should learn to discover we don't need all the "things" either. I am not entirely sure this was realized by Sarah.Overall, way to long, very predicatble, and because of Sarah's attitude (even post accident she is referring to her son's teachers shoes as ugly. Which initially is just a direction for her to dump some hate but then it keep up even later) it fell short of being inspirational for me.I'm torn now on Genova. Still Alice is a great book, but I'm not sure if Genova will stay on my "must read" list anymore. Maybe I'll give her another chance- but if she continues to fill up pages with materialistic dronings just to fill up pages- I think I'll pass.

I was a big fan of Lisa Genova's novel,  Still Alice  which was told from the point of view of a successful and respected professor at Harvard who develops early onset Alzheimer's. I thought that was a brilliant book and when I was done I had a better idea of what that disease was like, both for patient and caretaker. And I say that as someone who's father recently passed away from the disease - it's horrible, and more so when it strikes someone fairly young.In this book, Genova takes on Left Neglect, which is a brain dysfunction that leaves the sufferer unable to see or sense their left side. They are often not aware they have this since to them they are seeing the complete picture. This is obviously tremendously debilitating on so many levels. The person afflicted often cannot walk or move effectively and simple tasks like reading or writing become impossible.In this novel, Sarah is a 37 year married woman with 3 small children. She is a graduate of Harvard business school as is her husband Bob. They both have high stress and high paying jobs that require a lot of their time. They have a nanny taking care of their children although they try to share at least some of their day with these kids.While on the phone driving in her car Sarah gets into an accident. She wakes up in the hospital only to find out that she now has Left Neglect, and this story is about her coming to deal with this horrible condition and how it changes her own life and that of her family. We see that sometimes out of tragedy and misfortune comes some good - and in this case Sarah has to learn to slow her life down and appreciate what she's had all along.I really enjoyed this book and as in Still Alice, Lisa Genova really brings home what this condition does to its sufferer. Both of these books almost read like nonfiction and I mean that as compliment - they not only tell a good story but you learn something as well.Recommended, and I look forward to her next book.

Few will have heard of the brain injury Left Neglect, which occurs when the right sight of the brain is injured so that it does not acknowledge the existence of the right side of the body, be it eye, arm or leg.Author Lisa Genova covers this well in the story of Sarah Nickerson, a high-powered executive with a busy husband Bob and three children. Her eventful life has made her lose track of her mother.All this changes when a car accident while on the phone leaves her with Left Neglect. Typically, at first, she expects to be back at work very shortly, but eventually, she realises just how serious her condition is. Her mother becomes a vital part of her life again, and her bond is restored.Sarah accepts her condition, but a visit to her and Bob's favourite ski resort of Vermont changes her perspective as she realises that it is important to work within one's abilities, not disabilities.This is a most uplifting story, especially for one with a disability. It reminds us that if we just change our targets, we can have a more fulfilling life, perhaps even more so than before.

I've read a few more recent books by this author and have loved them all so decided to investigate her earlier novels hoping they are as good. She usually looks at some sort of medical condition and explores how it effects people, using her medical background alongside her amazing ability to communicate a great story. So I had high expectations!!It's likely that most readers will have no parallel to what these characters are experiencing but you immediately understand their world. Something makes a connection with the reader but it could be different for everyone and from that point onwards you are invested in their wellbeing and you care about them.As with her other novels, I fell straight into the main character's world. Her condition is hard to imagine but, within this novel, little inventiveness is required as the author gives us every detail about Sarah's daily battles. Normally I am uncomfortable with describing a recovery process as a fight but this novel made me rethink - Sarah has to battle with her condition and her mental strength allows her to keep fighting.The medical background of the author shines through as does her huge amounts of research to give us the human side of a devastating brain injury. Her brilliance is being able to combine knowledge and communication - I didn't want to put it down.I loved Bob and the kids are completely natural in their environment, dealing with all the change that is thrown at them. Particularly interesting was the similarities used between Sarah and Charlie (whose behaviour is starting to challenge everyone around him).Slight irritation that the end is quite tidy but it didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Lisa Genova's second novel is the story of Sarah Nickerson, vice president of human resources in a busy Boston recruiting company, wife to a busy IT consultant and mother to three children, one of whom is only a toddler. Sarah's days are action-packed and she never seems to have enough time. So it's not surprising, perhaps, that she decides to cut a corner by checking her phone while driving. But this decision will have fateful consequences. For Sarah crashes her car, knocks her head hard and - although she appears to come round from her temporary coma quickly - it soon becomes clear that something is horribly wrong. Sarah can't feel her left hand or foot - she isn't even really aware she has a left side. She only eats food off the right hand side of her plate, she only reads the right-hand page of a book, she can't put weight on her left side. Sarah, it transpires, is suffering from 'left neglect', a brain condition experienced by stroke sufferers and accident victims, in which your perception of 'left' vanishes. Sometimes you can recover of your own accord, but a good many sufferers - like Sarah - can only cope through a strenuous therapy programme and a willingness to learn how to live with their condition. It seems impossible for a busy workaholic - but as she undergoes therapy first in hospital and then at home, Sarah begins to realize her condition might not be the end of the world. For slowing down is giving her a chance to realize all the things that she's neglected - her relationship with her mother, which has long been tricky, her love of art, quality time with her family. Might 'left neglect' encourage her to stop neglecting other important things?Like 'Still Alice', 'Left Neglected' explores a neurological condition, and like 'Still Alice', Genova, a trained neuroscientist, does so very well. Although I felt a little confused about how Sarah lived with her condition long-term - did she genuinely start perceiving the 'left' of things again, how far had she recovered and how far would she? - I learnt a great deal about the condition, which I didn't know about at all, and the treatment of it - and about the horrors of the American healthcare system, where you are booted out of hospital once your insurance runs out! And Genova does all this with a fine light touch - so it never feels arduous, like reading a medical text book. I also felt on the positive side that the book made an important point - we've become so obsessed with money, success and materialism that many of us, like Sarah, tend to forget that there are other more important things out there, and to neglect important areas of our lives and personalities to our cost. Genova's encouragement to the reader to remember to 'stay still' and not to rush frantically through life ticking off achievements is something I wholeheartedly agree with.I stuck at a three-star rating though because I felt the book was overall a less satisfying read than 'Still Alice'. Alice, John and their children were satisfyingly believable and complex characters - even if you didn't always like them, they were always interesting, and Genova wove in all sorts of satisfying subplots, such as Lydia's acting experiences and reconciliation with her mother Alice and sister Anna, into the main narrative about Alice's Alzheimer's. Sarah Nickerson (are she and her husband Bob the 'Bob and Sarah' that John talks about in 'Still Alice', by the way?) simply wasn't as compelling as Alice Howland. I found her perpetually bright, wise-cracking burbly style (even when hospitalized and unable to walk) irritating after a while, and all too often she came across as rather shallow. (How many women, for example, on waking up from a terrible car accident, would worry first of all about their unshaved legs and the 'pig beard' on their chin?!) I also felt the story veered far more towards sentimentality than 'Still Alice'. We didn't see that much of the pain, panic and fury that an intelligent 'Left Neglect' patient like Sarah would undoubtedly feel about their condition, Genova rather glossed over Sarah's early traumas (the childhood death of her brother, her father's early death, her mother's depression) and the later scenes between Sarah and her mother seemed constructed deliberately to have a tear-jerker quality. There were some good subplots - the one about Sarah's son Charlie's attention-deficit disorder, for example - but they felt a bit rushed, and Sarah's daughter Lucy never featured enough. The end of the story seemed way too neat as well, particularly the way husband Bob - an amiable but underdeveloped character compared to John Howland - was suddenly able to completely alter his life. And, although I do believe in an afterlife, I had a slight fear that the heavenly visions were overly sentimental.'Left Neglected' is an interesting read, particularly for anyone keen on neurology. But I felt here that Genova had less interest in her characters as individuals than in 'Still Alice', and was more interested in using them as props to create a very slightly sugary morality tale with some neuroscience thrown in. I had this feeling slightly about 'Inside the O'Briens' too, so will be interested to read Genova's third and fifth novels (both about the same 'intellectual classes' as 'Still Alice') to see if they are different in style.

Like many other readers, I loved Still Alice, and so was looking forward to reading this novel.Sarah, a high-flying business woman with a young family, suffers a severe head injury in a car accident. This means that she can only see, feel, or register things on her right side, but not at all on her left. The novel relates Sarah's struggle to return to her normal state, assisted and supported by her long-suffering husband, Bob, and her mother, to whom she has never hitherto been close. So far, so good, and the premise is a promising one.However, I had two problems with this novel. To begin with, I didn't really warm to Sarah as a character, although I certainly wanted to find out what happened to her. And then for me, a lot of this novel read a bit like a text book. The author, herself a neuroscientist, certainly knows her stuff, but I felt that in this novel she overdoes it. She has obviously thoroughly researched her subject (the long list of acknowledgements at the end of the novel testify to this), and it shows. While the subject is interesting, I didn't need to be told in such detail what Sarah was feeling, seeing etc (and why) in such minute detail, and at times this became boring and held up the storyline. The last third of the book moved more quickly, and I certainly wanted to finish it, but the ending was a bit too neat to be credible.An okay novel, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

Whilst I loved  Still Alice , "Left Neglected" left me disappointed, wondering, unimpressed. Mostly, I think, because I found it hard to connect with the main heroine, career-obsessed super mum Sarah Nickerson who, after the car crash, finds her universe divided into the right (the world on the right, which she finds perfectly complete) and the left (the missing second half of the world of which she lost the ability to be aware of). Sounds complicated? It somewhat is. And no matter how easy-flowing and engaging the book is, the psychological condition it portrays lacks the description, the narration, the explanations that would allow me to fully grasp and understand the condition of the narrator. It just felt a bit made up (although it is real, albeit very rare, neuropsychological condition).I guess once you fail to connect with the heroine, you start noticing the repetitiveness, the familiar plot, the predictability of the whole thing. Lisa Genova, it seems, found her golden formula of writing bestselling fiction, and decided to stick with it. And fair enough. But "Left Neglected" is a far cry from the intelligent and moving  Still Alice .Leave it neglected. Socks firmly on. Still AliceStill Alice