Review: Awesome book with just a few bugs
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 29, 2014
I received a review copy of the book in return for my fair and honest opinions, which follow:Alzheimers in one of the most devastating diseases to ravage families across this grand planet.  Slowly stripping individuals of their memories, it brutally robs individuals of their identities while completely changing how their families operate.  Many of my friends have loved ones who have succumbed to this hideous monster of a disease, and I've watched the devastation unfold.  Memories make us who we are.  But what if all that could be changed?  But what if a cure is not worth the risk?LONG STORY SHORT...Written with a medical accuracy only possible from someone who has worked in the medical field, The Art of Forgetting is a masterpiece of medical and psychological suspense.  This artful novel follows part of the story of Lloyd Copeland, an esteemed doctor who has devoted his life to the search for a cure for Alzheimer's, a brutal identity thieving disease which affected his father, and his father's father before him.  For Lloyd, it is only a matter of time.  He must find this cure.  He is so close to finding a cure....but at what cost?A suspenseful plot that includes medical mystery, psychological discovery, romance, and a sinister plot to ruin someone's career for the sake of riches - this novel has a little something for everyone.  Even my husband was intrigued, and he doesn't read fiction.Palmieri, an esteemed medical professional himself, is a superb author.  He successfully creates a character who is about as huggable as a porcupine on crack, but that you just want to keep hugging despite the quills.  Medical situations are crafted with a clear insider's knowledge of how the medical world actually operates.  The plot unfolds in a complex manner that is twisted but not confusing.  My only quibbles with the book are thus: during some conversation scenes it is hard to track who is talking, and it is so infinitely detailed that in several scenes I got lost in minutia.  Otherwise, a superb book.  Part of me hopes Lloyd's story continues...On an ascending scale of 1 to 5, this book receives a 4.LONG STORYThe GoodI absolutely loved this book.  This morning when I was finishing reading, my husband was asking me to "get up....you've been awake for an hour already!"  My response?  "I'm finishing the book I've been reading!!"The Art of Forgetting is one of the most intricate and psychologically satisfying books that I've read in a very long time.  It contains levels of deceit, manipulation, familial and relational history, medical information, and interesting selfishness that were just plain satisfying to unravel as the pages turned (rather quickly, I might add).Lloyd Copeland is an esteemed medical professional who has a bright future ahead of him....if he can manage to toe the line to keep his job when his superiors seem determined to derail his research.  This isn't just his research, this is his life.  You see, Copeland is conducting research on a possible cure for Alzheimers.  His father was ravaged by the disease, as was his father before him.  So were their wives.  For Copeland, it is only a matter of time before the disease ravishes him too.Romantic relationships?  Who in their right mind would start one knowing it would end in Alzheimers?But then along comes Erin, the woman whom he knew as a girl and who might challenge everything he thought he knew about being in love...Pets?  Only if you count the mice he injects with the "cure" he has discovered....Close friendships?  Who has the time to get close to anyone when one is trying to save his own life?This is the story of a man who is set to begin human trials of a revolutionary new cure for Alzheimer's, a cure which will never reach humanity if Copeland doesn't figure out what happened with the mouse who apparently died from the cure, who is blocking his research and how, and who is after his job?  Are they all the same person?  What are their motives?  And just what is he supposed to do with the beguiling woman who won't leave his thoughts?Gosh, I loved this book.I loved it because it was set in the modern world (I've read a lot of mythical stuff lately, as well as a decent amount of dystopian futures) and the characters feel like real people I might meet in a real coffee shop or hospital.  They are human, fragile, running from their own personal demons, fallible, and determined to reach specific goals. They behave in ways that make sense according to their unique personalities, rather than in ways that simply serve the author's purposes.  They refuse to be defined easily.I loved it because it has roots in psychology, which was my major in college and is one of my continuing passions.  Yet it's psychological roots were balanced with medical roots as well (not one or the other, as so often happens in fiction that deals with a condition of some sort).  These medical roots were clearly laid out by an author who has a real-world grasp of medicine and so made inherent sense and was true to science.  This is important!  I've read stories with medical aspects where it is clear the author is a novice trying to make sense of the the medical terms they're researching for their story.  Not so here.  Palmieri is an actual doctor and the medical writing here is spot-on.I loved it because we so often hear on the news "This doctor from this place is starting  human trials for medicine designed to address this condition...." and here we have a story of what went behind a trial.  Granted, the trial is fictional, but it is good to remember that behind every drug that ever went to human trials, there were humans trying to figure out a disease.  Humans with motivations and mental struggles all their own.I loved it because it has a super complex and intriguing plot that is rather unpredictable, engaging, and quite a whirlwind.  I needed to know what happened next....lost a bit of sleep while reading this book.  : )I loved it because psychology and medicine are all wrapped together with and ethical debate that unfolds within these pages.  What are the ethics of conducting trials of an experimental drug on humans?  What are the ethics of leaving thousands of families to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's?  What would your ethics demand if you were close to a cure that could help millions, including yourself (possibly....but you'll have to read the book to see why I said that), but everything was inexplicably standing in your way?The Bugly (bad/ugly)Two significant issues caused this book to lose a star:1) Characters sound too much like one another.  Regular readers of my blog know this is one of my pet peeves.  Yes yes yes, I get that many of these characters are highly educated individuals who would have traveled in high academic circles with the same kinds of speech patterns.  Truly, I get that.  It just bugs me when characters sound too similar to one another, particularly when conversational scenes don't contain many of the "he said, she said, then he said" kind of identifiers that show you clearly who is speaking.  Many scenes here confused the bugger out of me as I tried to figure out who was saying what.  They needed more identifiers to show who was talking.2)  Too.  Much.  Detail.  Okay, I get that a certain amount of detail is necessary for medical explanations and processes to make sense.  The problem is that I get so stuck in the minutia of some of the scenes that it felt like my brain was stuck in a slog of information.  Maybe I was just looking for too much story around the details, but every medical thing was explained in far too much detail.  Don't worry, I have the same complaint about Lord of the Rings and some of the battle scenes.  Detail is good.  Too much detail is difficult.