Genova expertly details the devastation ALS wreaks on Richard, and though her latest is a sometimes difficult read, she finds hope in the opportunities Richard has to repair his relationships with his daughter and brothers before it’s too late.

Lisa Genova, the neuroscientist and author who riveted audiences with her tale of early onset dementia in Still Alice, delivers another gripping journey through a dread disease in Every Note Played. This time she trains her masterful storytelling skills on ALS as it plays out in a fractured family ... Genova continues to refine her niche of using fiction to describe the scientific and emotional impact of disease on the stricken person and their caregivers ... This time Genova enriches the medical story with the power of music, capturing in words what sound feels like ... As the ultimate life-or-death decision arrives, Genova crystallizes the choice that so many real-life families feel when disease strikes: 'It’s either his life or hers.'

Ms. Genova is far more serious and readable, concerned as much with depicting the clinical realities of ALS as in wringing it for emotional catharsis. You might drop a few tears reading Every Last Note but you won’t feel bullied into doing so

There are not many plot twists here: Richard's decline is linear and straightforward. Its inevitability is crushing ... The book does especially well in conveying information about ALS, its treatment, and what it takes to care for someone with the condition ... Every Note Played is a good read with plenty of characters, and despite the sad story it has enough subplots for the reader to maintain enthusiasm. It should help educate people about ALS and also about both classical and jazz music.

Lisa Genova’s words, grip and gut. She shot to literary stardom with her breakout novel Still Alice, which was made into a movie not because she had a big publishing house backing her. She didn’t. She self-published and sold her books one by one. And one by one, word spread because Genova knows how to tell a story ... And though the drumbeat gets louder with every page turned, it’s how Richard and his former wife deal with ALS and with each other, that is the book’s heart. ALS does not make them better people. Genova never once sacrifices truth for sentiment. But ALS does make them people who know that time is running out.

Whereas some authors might craft a perfect, sympathetic character to hurl into the storm of ALS, Genova takes a far more interesting path. Richard is not someone the reader might like to date, marry or even be friends with, but there is something deeply sad about watching this concert performer lose his only talent, his only means of supporting himself and his only love ... Genova crafts a much more elegant storyline, giving her readers a nuanced yet crushingly realistic look at illness, marriage and the process of dying ... That said, I did find the pacing to be a bit jumbled. Perhaps Genova was attempting to mimic the pacing of the disease itself, with its incremental losses and punctuations of relief. I would have liked to see more of Richard’s and Karina’s stories, and particularly to have been given greater insight into their failed marriage. Of course, I raise this criticism only because Genova has written such memorable characters that I wanted to continue to love, rage and grow with them for longer than the mere 300 pages I was given ... That is the power of a Lisa Genova novel: to raise awareness and hope through compassionate storytelling, raw science and a tremendous amount of love.

Thus the novel has contrapuntal themes—the body’s decline matched with a different struggle, toward psychic reconciliation for Richard, and Karina too. While undeniably formulaic, Genova’s latest is one of her strongest—more internalized, sometimes slow, but an eloquent and touching imagining of how a peaceful terminal place might be reached.

Genova meticulously catalogues the disease’s physical ravages and corresponding psychological toll, which makes for gut-wrenching but suspenseful reading ... The detail Genova infuses into each narrator’s thought process, observations, and love for music makes them distinct, yet also reveals their compatibility. Genova also admirably refrains from making either too angelic; their harrowing journey, though it lacks any true narrative surprises, is both substantively informative about ALS and an emotionally wrenching psychological portrait.