OH Lord I am sorry. I am so far in the minority here ---if i could have given it a zero I would have. I only finished it because it was short and wanted to say I read it all in case there was a gem at the end. There wasn't . I could not related to the characters -- no depth to Ruth and even less to Linus. I saw no beauty, no emotion and did not find it moving as many others used these words to describe this book SO sorry. the only thing I did like was the fact that the grad students came together for Ruth's father and "created" a class for him to teach because they loved him and knew he missed teaching.
A few days after Christmas in a small suburb outside of L.A., pairs of a man's pants hang from the trees. The pants belong to Howard Young, a prominent history professor, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Howard's wife, Annie, summons their daughter, Ruth. Freshly disengaged from her fiance and still broken up about it, feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, thirty-year-old Ruth quits her job and arrives home to find her parents' situation worse than she'd realized. Her father is erratically lucid and her mother, a devoted and creative cook, sees the sources of memory loss in every pot and pan. But as Howard's condition intensifies, the comedy in Ruth's situation takes hold, gently transforming her grief. She throws herself into caretaking: cooking dementia-fighting meals (a feast of jellyfish!), researching supplements, anything to reignite her father's once-notable memory. And when the university finally lets Howard go, Ruth and one of her father's handsome former students take their efforts to help Howard one step too far.