This book reads like a fairly straightforward exercise in writing and in Alzheimer’s advocacy. I expected to find it overwhelmingly depressing - I think I’ve said at one point that I would need to spend a year at Disney World to recover from reading this book, or something like that - but at the end of the day I found it merely sad, and perhaps classically tragic. Maybe that’s the idea, to paint Alzheimer’s as a terrible but relatable or accessible disease. I can’t say the writing was all that great - the characters were a bit too flat, the dialog was a few shades too cloying, the plot was a bit too predictable in service of making a point. In particular the scenes toward the end - the big speech, the graduation - rang hollow. I did find the interaction between Alice and Lydia to be somewhat interesting - the whole bit with Lydia’s acting vis-a-vis Alice’s disease-induced interest in screenplays was heartwarming if a bit too neat. Otherwise I thought the characters were a bit on the shallow side, and I think there were a lot of missed opportunities (including the biggest one of all: that there is just on clever usage of Alice’s expertise in linguistics vis-a-vis her diminishing facility with the spoken word. A real shame.) On the whole, this book was a quick and easy read, and not unenjoyable.