Book Review: Splinters of Light By Rachael Herron

SPLINTERS OF LIGHT

By: Rachael Herron

Published: March 3, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Random House NAL

Fiction/Women’s Fiction

Imagine you are a successful 44-year-old woman. You have overcome raising your daughter alone after your husband left you for a younger woman and started a new family.  Your newspaper columns have become syndicated and you have authored best-selling books. Your twin sister is finally becoming successful in her own right and your next door neighbor is a “friend with benefits”. Life is grand until you realize things have started becoming fuzzy. You often find yourself “getting stuck” and can’t figure out why. After numerous tests, the doctor reveals your diagnosis, EOAD or Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  This can’t be happening to Nora. She is the Martha Stewart of organization. She is the one who handles everything. She has a 16-year-old daughter who needs her. Nora can’t understand why this is happening to her. She can’t trace it back to anyone in her family since she doesn’t know her father and her mother died young. She can’t imagine telling her twin sister, Mariana and her daughter, Ellie. What if they have it too? What will happen to her family, her career, and all of their futures?

EOAD is a horrible disease that wrecks the minds of people still in the prime of their life. As you follow Nora through her early stages of diagnosis, you realize this isn’t going to be a happy story. We know there possibly can’t be a happy ending. Even though there have been advances in medicine, there is not a cure for Alzheimer’s.

I found myself moving slowly through the pages because I wasn’t looking forward to the ending. I didn’t want to read the debilitating changes in Nora’s life; from yelling at her daughter, to getting lost downtown, to eventually losing her job. I didn’t want to watch Nora lose control of her life.  So, I too became stuck, like Nora, in this book.  I didn’t want to read further, but I didn’t want to stop either.

Then, at some point in the story, I realized this story wasn’t really just about the EOAD, but about the relationship between Nora and her twin sister, between Nora and her daughter, and the three of them as a family. I became overcome with emotion as I struggled with Mariana and Ellie accepting the loss of someone so dearly loved. As a mother, my heart broke for Ellie, who had to grow up much too fast.  As a professional, I suffered alongside Nora as she feared losing the ability to say or write the right words.   I loved the honest way Nora described the disease:

Rachael Herron – source