Turn of Mind By Alice Laplante is about an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hand surgery diagnosed with dementia. She's accused of killing her long-time best friend, who is found with four digits of one hand surgically removed. Already far along with dementia, each time the police question her, it is the first time she's heard her best friend is dead.

Rather the whole truth is being presented to the police about not remembering anything at all, or if she may remember some aspects of the crime at varying times but uses her disease to cover up the truth, is anyone's guess.

It is written in first person, as she battles the disease. She keeps a journal that her private nurse helps her write in daily. This enables her to travel to any day or time in her journal to have an idea of that day, and the things she may have forgotten. It's also a record of how she was doing on that day.

She has a son and daughter who both seem to have good and bad parts of their character.

I think the book would have been better if she would have spent more time incorporating both characters.

The complex relationship with her best friend who ends up dead, is written really well. It's about a love/hate relationship between two strong-willed women.

We learn of the various characters and their relationships through flashbacks and stories of the previous years.

The book drags through the first half, with a few more interesting parts along the way. It picks up a bit in the second half, but still not as much as I would have liked.

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer. She also teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has been widely published in Epoch, Southwestern Review, and other literary journals. Alice is the author of six books, including the LA Times bestseller Method and Madness: The Making of a Story (W.W. Norton 2009). Her first novel, Turn of Mind, was a New York Times , NPR, and American Independent Booksellers Association bestseller, won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and was named a New York Times and Booklist Editors’ Choice and a #1 IndieNextPick. She lives with her family in Northern California. Author website: alicelaplante.com

New York Times Best Seller
320 Pages
3.9 Overall Rating
426 Words

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