Elder Rage, or Take My Father... Please!

Jacqueline Marcell
Impressive Press (2001)
ISBN 0967970318
Reviewed by Joanne Benham for Reader Views (8/06)

Jacqueline Marcell was recovering from back surgery when she got a call telling her that her mother was dying. Jacqueline closed up her home in Southern California and went to San Francisco to be with her.  When she arrives at her parent’s house, her mother is comatose, the house is so dirty it takes seventy hours labor to clean, and her father has turned into a raging beast and attempts to kill her.  This is not what Jacqueline needs in her life right now.  She had recently been fired, a long-time romance had gone sour and her cat died.  The one good thing about all of this is that she has lots of time for her parents and their problems.  They have a lot of problems, beginning with being prescribed the wrong drugs to having their illnesses misdiagnosed. 

Slowly, Jacqueline begins to bring order back into their world.  Caught up in frustrating battles with egotistical health care professionals, she spends hours at the library searching for a true diagnosis of their illnesses as a means of allowing her parents to live out their lives with dignity and self-respect.  It takes her nine months, but with the help of a high-school dropout and some caring friends, she finally triumphs.

I could truly empathize with Jacqueline as she pits herself against the health care industry, endlessly frustrated with their failures, and struggling to find someone who will listen to her.  The book was hard to put down; you just had to turn the next page to see what Jake and Mariel were doing.  Watching the gentle Mariel finally standing up to bully Jake was the best part of the whole book.

At the end of the book are some invaluable resources relating to the care of elders, including behavior changes that could be an early warning sign of dementia and ways of dealing with a difficult or physically abusive elder.  This book would stand on its own as a great novel, but knowing we’re reading about real people makes it so much more engaging.

There was only one thing I really disliked about the book.  That was Jacqueline’s penchant for relating everything that happens in her life to a movie, a television show or a book.  While funny the first couple of times, it gets tiresome very quickly. 

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