How do any of us know what we would do if we were told we had early onset Alzheimer’s? In Island Girl (Berkley Publishing), author Lynda Simmons tells the emotionally riveting story of a mother who is fighting to reunite her family before her Alzheimer’s gets so bad she won’t even remember who her family is.

Ruby Donaldson just celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday and is well aware that the best is not to come. Proud of being in great shape from years of canoeing and weight training, she knows it won’t help her now and that nothing can stop or slow down the inevitable decline before her.

While Ruby acknowledges the terrible reality of her illness, she refuses to let it control her future. Diagnosed only a year earlier, she is already at the point of having to leave herself notes about everything she must get done that day – only some days she doesn’t even remember to look at the notes.

Before she can take any final action in the decision she has made about her life, she has to find a way to convince her estranged daughter Liz to grow up and come home. Home is the house the Donaldson family has owned for generations that sits on Ward’s Island, one of the islands that make up the land mass off the Toronto Harbor. Ruby needs Liz to take her place as head of the family thereby securing the future of their island home and ensuring that Liz’s younger sister, Grace, will be cared for in the only place that is safe for her.

But Liz can’t help wondering why she should forgive her mother a lifetime of sins just because she’s sick. Does Alzheimer’s grant Ruby instant immunity – a kind of moral get-out-of-jail-free card?

Ruby always thought she would have a lifetime to make things right; never dreaming she would be cut short by this dreadful disease. With time running out fast, she must put her broken family back together quickly while searching for a way to deal with the inevitable – and she must do it with all the grit, stubbornness and unstoppable determination that make Ruby who she is – before she is no longer Ruby.

Author Lynda Simmons has received rave reviews for Island Girl, as she displays a unique insight and compassion into the affect this disease has on families. The inspiration for Ruby came while Simmons was visiting the nursing home of one of her own family members, also afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and she saw first-hand how different generations deal with this debilitating illness. Simmons shows how Ruby, who made bad choices in her life and alienated lovers and friends and even one of her own children, now finds herself needing forgiveness and compassion, something she herself was never good at, from the very people she pushed away.  

This is the second book from Lynda Simmons – a writer by day, college instructor by night, who lives with her husband in the picturesque town of Burlington, just outside Toronto, Canada.  

Please visit Lynda on her website at: www.lyndasimmons.com.

Tags: book reviews, fiction, Island Girl, Lynda Simmons