Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Left Neglected, by Lisa Genova ***

Sarah Nickerson is like any other career-driven supermom in Welmont, the affluent Boston suburb where she leads a hectic but charmed life with her husband Bob, faithful nanny, and three children—Lucy, Charlie, and nine-month-old Linus.
Between recruiting the best and brightest minds as the vice president of human resources at Berkley Consulting; shuttling the kids to soccer, day care, and piano lessons; convincing her son’s teacher that he may not, in fact, have ADD; and making it home in time for dinner, it’s a wonder this over-scheduled, over-achieving Harvard graduate has time to breathe.

A self-confessed balloon about to burst, Sarah miraculously manages every minute of her life like an air traffic controller. Until one fateful day, while driving to work and trying to make a phone call, she looks away from the road for one second too long. In the blink of an eye, all the rapidly moving parts of her jam-packed life come to a screeching halt.

A traumatic brain injury completely erases the left side of her world, and for once, Sarah relinquishes control to those around her, including her formerly absent mother. Without the ability to even floss her own teeth, she struggles to find answers about her past and her uncertain future.

Now, as she wills herself to regain her independence and heal, Sarah must learn that her real destiny—her new, true life—may in fact lie far from the world of conference calls and spreadsheets. And that a happiness and peace greater than all the success in the world is close within reach, if only she slows down long enough to notice.

I thought this book was good, but not great. The first few chapters drew me in. I liked the main character and could relate to her life; but it went down hill from there. I wasn't as fond of the dream sequences, where each chapter started with a description of a weird dream that the main character had... I knew those dreams were a way to show how her life was spinning out of control, and that they'd stop after the accident, but I didn't like them. Fortunately, they were written in italics, and I could flip past them and get straight to the 'real' story.

Full disclosure - I picked up this book because I've had a traumatic brain injury, and it's about a similar injury to mine, stemming from the same sort of accident. I read that the author has her PhD in neuroscience from Harvard, and I wondered how accurate the book would be. I was a bit disappointed that she didn't touch on any of the other issues that stem from a right hemisphere brain injury - it focused entirely on Left Neglect (when the brain doesn't recognize the left side) and left out everything else - that made it harder for me to buy into the story. Luckily for me, I did not experience left neglect; but I did (do) deal with a whole host of other issues stemming from the brain injury that weren't even mentioned in the book. I found it unrealistic that she only had that one (major) problem to deal with. That left the story feeling incomplete to me.

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