Do Not Think About Tomorrow Book

Often follow-up books seem written to capitalise on the first book's success and this is no exception. It seems as though Genova has invented a new genre, neurological chicklit.

I didn't think it was as good as her first book, Still Alice but perhaps that's in part because Still Alice had a likeable protagonist who progressed through a disease and the reader travelled with her. In Left Neglected, Sarah Nickerson is not a likeable person, she's just too up herself with her boasting at every opportunity of what a success she is in business and as a supermother.

I was sympathetic to her story of brain damage and the consequential loss of attention to her left side but her condition (and the book) never got better and the adjustments she made weren't really the stuff or drama, or even much improvement. At the end of the story she is less overbearing than at the start, but first impressions do count, and she didn't make a good one on me.

The neurological condition was interesting. I had heard of it but not much about it. I probably would have gone on thinking it was an all-or-nothing kind of disorder - if you have it you're doomed forever never to know that the left side of the world (and yourself) exists if I hadn't read V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. This is a really interesting neurological disorder book, more scientific than Oliver Sacks and just as interesting, even if Ramachandran isn't such a warm and personally engaging author as Sacks.

In Phantoms, there is so much more to left neglect, or hemispatial neglect as it is also called. An aside - right neglect scarcely exists because of the way the brain processes information. There is much treatment that can be offered to a sufferer, from prism glasses, to vibration of the neck muscles to focus attention, plus many other drug and behavioural therapies. Very little of this is mentioned in Left Neglect. It is as if the author had thought of a good idea and then thought the technical stuff just doesn't fit the story and that character rather than plot will be the mainstay of the book.

Not a bad book by any means. But the essence of light fiction is immediate identification and sympathy with the protagonists and their situation, (think Bridget Jones's Diary, if that is missing there has to be something deeper or exciting to take it's place and there wasn't anything, or not for me. It was just a one-note book, and for that it gets 3 stars.