A Perfect Life: A Novel
4/5
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About this ebook
A luminous and insightful novel that considers the moral complexities of scientific discovery and the sustaining nature of love. A young researcher at MIT, Jane Weiss is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. Her pursuit is deeply personal—Valentine’s killed her mother, and she and her freewheeling sister, Laurel, could be genetic carriers; each has a fifty percent chance of developing the disease. Having seen firsthand the devastating effect Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane is terrified she might become a burden on whomever she falls in love with and so steers clear of romantic entanglement. Then, the summer before her father’s second wedding, Jane falls hard for her future stepbrother, Willie. But Willie’s father also died from Valentine’s, raising the odds that their love will end in tragedy.
When Willie bolts at a crucial moment in their relationship, Jane becomes obsessed with finding the genetic marker to the disease that threatens both their families. But if she succeeds in making history, will she and her sister have the courage to face the truth this newfound knowledge could hold for their lives? A Perfect Life is a novel of scientific and self discovery, about learning how to embrace life and love, no matter what may come. Eileen Pollack conjures a thought-provoking, emotionally resonant story of one woman’s brilliance and bravery as she confronts her deepest fears and desires—and comes to accept the inevitable and the unexpected.
Eileen Pollack
Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, New York. She has received fellowships from the Michener Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Literary Review, the AGNI Review, Playgirl, and the New Generation. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, and teaches at Tufts University. She won the Pushcart Prize for her story “Past, Future, Elsewhere.”
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Reviews for A Perfect Life
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The disease: Valentine's Chorea. The symptoms: violent uncontrollable shuddering, inappropriate sexual propositioning, inability to control all bodily functions. The concept: fiction, but non-medically based somewhat on Huntington's Chorea (Woody Guthrie's disease). Two sisters don't know if they are carriers of the gene, since it has not yet been identified. Jane becomes a scientist to find out more about the disease that killed her mother, and she succeeds. She falls in love with her stepbrother, whose father also died of Valentine's. The science is interesting, but what really makes this a successful story is Jane's discovery of a large group of Valentine's sufferers on an isolated Maine island. Also very well written are her lab mates and the ties that bind them all in the hunt for the culprit. The sexual symptoms of the disease seemed gratuitous - what could really make shaking to death any worse? This is a good novel that goes beyond medical mystery.