(5/20/2010)
I thought this book had a lot of good information, and was intriguing in many ways. I particularly thought the daily quiz the protagonist set up to test herself and protect herself from overstaying her intellectual shelf life was terrific. If the author had had the courage to allow her heroine to die with dignity, I would have applauded the book. However, I found the ending jarringly false. Everyone was living happily ever-after, including the older daughter who was breezing through raising infant twins, while knowing she herself was going to suffer her mother's fate, and happily having bed-soiling mother live with her (with the help of one of those marvelous care-givers who seem to exist mostly between the covers of not-very-realistic novels). My mother and my mother in law both died of Alzheimer's, and they were not "still" the women they had been all their lives, even if they occupied the bodies that had once contained them. Had they been able to die with dignity three years before their ignominious deaths, the places they occupy in the memories of those left behind would have been far different.