Wow! This is an incredible read. Still Alice is so well written that you don't even realize what the author is setting you up for until the loss hits you. In the beginning the writing is full of complicated scientific descriptions that are hard to digest. Alice is brilliant and it's a little intimidating. I want to skip over the scholarly explanations. Then Alice is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As her memory starts to fail I notice that now the pages are full of uncertainty and shame instead of descriptions of her academic passions. It's heartbreaking and so scary. Alice becomes difficult and her frustrations boil over. Lisa Genova made me feel what it was like to have Alzheimer's. The simpler Alice's thoughts became the more of a contrast there was to the beginning of the book. Every time I read the word "thingy" I want to just cry. How can such a brilliant women who was such a huge contributor to language studies be reduced to using words like "thingy"? While I was reading I felt like the characters needed more development, but now that I'm finished I understand why the author wrote the book the way she did. I think if we were more emotionally connected to the characters we would have been more focused on the loss of a loved one rather than what this disease does to someone's mind. For the person who has Alzheimer's you can't remember your loved ones enough to feel the loss. What they can remember is some shell of their former self and that is the loss they can feel. 
 Character Casting 
 Alice: Susan Surandon