Inside the O'Briens
Ratings8
Average rating4.3
Patrol officer Joe O'Brien is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. A tough cop with a soft interior, a loving wife and four adult children, Joe is diagnosed with Huntington's disease. As Joe's symptoms worsen and he's eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while his daughter Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life "at risk" or learn their fate.
"From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Lisa Genova comes a powerful new novel that does for Huntington's Disease what her debut Still Alice did for Alzheimer's. Joe O'Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family's lives forever: Huntington's Disease. Huntington's is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe's four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father's disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father's escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she's gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing? As Joe's symptoms worsen and he's eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life "at risk" or learn their fate. Praised for writing that "explores the resilience of the human spirit" (The San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core"--
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Lisa Genova invented the genre of “neurofiction,” which seems to be a mash-up of pedantry about neurologic diseases and kind of banal fiction. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't know anything about Huntington. Since I almost certainly know more about Genova does about HD (in that I'm a board certified clinical geneticist and she's...not.) I just got a kind of run-of-the-mill family tension novel.
As part of my job, I get referral e-mails from our international medicine team, bulky with attachments of clinical charts from all around the world. Often this results in me reading them while pacing my office and swearing as the diagnosis dawns on me and I can't tell if the referring team has figured it out. That's how I felt for the first 90 pages of this book: a laundry list of textbook symptoms of HD that seemed to happen absent plot or character development. To the point where I could see it in my own e-mail shorthand in my head: “40s yo m w new onset invol mvmts and labile emotions, ?subacute duration up to 10y. Fhx notable for mother w poss same. High concern for HD, rec urgent appt w genetics for counseling & HTT repeat expansion analysis.” Needless to say, I found those 90 pages stressful rather than enjoyable.
Once the HD cat was out of the bag, the novel swung to focus on Katie, the youngest daughter, stopping along the way to rack up treacly family scenes. Katie was supposed to be the audience self-insert character, but I found her paralysis and self-absorbed self-pity infuriating rather than sympathetic. After the HD textbook checklist had been marked off, it kind of felt like HD could be replaced with basically any family tension McGuffin and the book just felt really generic.
My other complaint was the portrayal of the genetic counselor. As the only authority figure appearing in the book, it really annoyed me that he was a man, while most GCs are female. It seemed to be done on purpose for sexual tension between the GC and Katie, which is just so inappropriate and gross.
Reviewing it, I think it sounds like I hated the book; I didn't, I just found it really bland. I also think this genre is important for encouraging more awareness of HD and genetic disease in general, but I didn't need it.
Beautiful book, yes it's sad look into a family living with a family member with Huntington's disease but it is done with brilliance. You can sense everybody's fear, anger and love through this book. I knew a little bit about this disease by watching documentaries but this book gives you a personal aspects and you cannot read this book without shedding a tear more than once.
