See What Hope Really Looks Like In "inside The O'Briens

Title: Inside The O'Briens
Author:  Lisa Genova
Format:  ERC
Length:  352 pages
Expected Date of Publication:  April 7th, 2015
Publisher:  Gallery Books
Rating:  5 Stars
 
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Lisa Genova comes a powerful new novel that does for Huntington’s Disease what her debut Still Alice did for Alzheimer’s.

 Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.

 Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?

 As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.

 Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (The San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core.  -Goodreads

My Thoughts

The story of a family struggling to come to terms with the devastating knowledge that their father/ husband, Joe O'Brien, has Huntington's Disease. A progressively debilitating and ultimately fatal neurological disorder.
Narrated by both Joe, and his youngest daughter Katie, Inside The O'Briens, puts readers on very intimate terms with both the disease, and the long reaching and life altering effects of Joe's diagnosis for himself and those he loves.

Written in three parts. The story chronicles Joe's life, and by extension, the lives of his family from life before his diagnosis, to well into its symptomatic onset.

Though often hard to read.  What this story offers the reader is an unflinchingly real view of the life choices, life changes, and often harsh realities faced by those lives touched by Huntington's.

On a brighter note.  This story is also one of profound hope.
Because although the specter of this disease's ramifications looms spectacularly large over thus family.  They each, in their own way, vow to live, love, and be more than a diagnosis.

About Lisa
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. There are over 2.1 million copies in print, and it has been translated into 31 languages. It 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.

Still Alice is now a major motion picture from Sony Pictures Classics.

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