Turn of Mind

Everyone in book club finished this book!

The writing style was very unique in this book as there were no quote marks around things that people are saying and there are lots of bits of space on the page. We did find this a little confusing and hard to get used to.

We found that both Jennifer and Amanda were both very manipulative and at certain parts of the book we were really not all that sure why they were even friends with each other. They seemed to want to get one up on each other and were very unpleasant to each other at times. We found this friendship on the whole to be pretty toxic and quite confusing.

This book is told by the ultimate unreliable narrator as Jennifer has alzheimers and we see her going through the process of gradually forgetting things, having her life completely changed without her knowledge of why. There were moments of complete clarity and then moments when she had no idea what on earth was happening or even who she was. She was someone you felt very sorry for because of her illness but also found quite unlikeable due to her character prior to her illness.

As a medical book club we wondered how the author went about the research into how people with dementia actually feel. This would be a very tricky thing to do as they might not understand what's being asked of them. Maybe she simply relied on watching people with dementia and coming up with what she thinks it's like? We had a discussion about dementia and other brain related research we had heard about.

We felt that this might be a useful book for people caring for those with dementia to read, and just for people wanting a little insight into what dementia does to a person. Overall, we felt that this book was far more about dementia than it is about the murder mystery, in fact some of us forgot that was the main plot point until the killer was revealed at the end!

Overall we gave this book 8 out of 10.