Sarah Vallance was thrown from a horse, walked away convinced she was fine, and was being led from work to an emergency room by the following morning. By the end of that week a neurologist told her that her IQ had collapsed with no hope of recovery. Prognosis is the memoir she wrote afterward, and the audiobook, nine hours and eight minutes from Brilliance Audio, released on August 1, 2019, is read by Cat Gould rather than by Vallance. That single casting decision is the first thing about this edition worth thinking through.
A Kindle First Reads Promotion Explains This
Cat Gould voices a first-person account of a woman painstakingly relearning how to read and write. Memoirs of illness and recovery are often self-read, and the argument for that is obvious enough: the voice becomes part of the evidence. Here the credit goes to a professional instead, and the case for that choice is just as strong. A book about losing the ability to form a sentence does not need its author to spend nine hours proving she can perform them now, and the reader who takes the job takes the strain along with it.
Jillian's August 2019 response explains the entire shape of this review column in a single line: the book arrived as a Kindle First Reads selection for July 2019. That is an ebook promotion, which accounts for why the responses cluster in the weeks around it and why two of them carry dates from before the audio edition existed. The five voices gathered under this listing are describing something they read on a screen over a few evenings, not the recording that is actually for sale here.
Doc Maven's five-star entry from July 2019 is a defense rather than a review. Some readers, it reports, turned against the book over something Vallance does roughly a third of the way through, and the response argues that finishing changes how the episode reads, including how you understand her feeling for the animal involved in the injury itself. No spoiler is offered there and none will be offered here. Take it as a content warning: something in the middle third distresses people, and animals are involved in it.
Empathize With the Narrator Means Vallance
Brilliance Audio published the recording on August 1, 2019, four weeks after the earliest response on the page was filed. Nine hours and eight minutes is a standard length for a memoir of this scope, and the description covers a great deal of territory inside it: the fall, the diagnosis, the withdrawal from everyone, a disability pension that barely covered groceries, the dogs, the rage, the slow return to paid work, and a relationship that arrives late and changes what the ending can be.
Empathize with the narrator is the headline on the four-star response, and it repays a second look, because the word does not mean what a listener would assume it means. The body settles it: the narrator being empathized with is Vallance, the voice on the page, not the voice in your ears. The one entry in the column that appears to promise an opinion about the reading turns out to be about the writing instead, which is a useful reminder to check a headline against its body before trusting either.
Vallance's prose is the thing the column actually agrees on, and the agreement is unusually specific for a five-response page. The four-star entry says the style did not work at first and sharpened considerably once the past opened up, and it praises what gets left out rather than what gets piled in. The United Kingdom response from July calls it one of the most remarkable autobiographies that reader had encountered. The Canadian entry from September goes further and says that after the last page you feel you know her.
No Way to Skim Past the Worst
Seven votes stand behind the 4.2 displayed at the top of this page, and five of the people involved wrote something. That is a slender evidence base by any standard, and four of those five are five-star entries, which tells you that the people who finished the book felt strongly about it. What it cannot tell you is what the people who put it down felt, and the defense mounted in one of those five responses makes it clear that some readers did put it down.
July 3 and July 7, 2019 are the dates on two of the five responses, and the audio edition did not exist until August 1. Reviews predating the thing they are attached to are common on pooled listings and are usually harmless. Here the mismatch carries more weight, because the promotional push that produced them was for a different format entirely, and a memoir read on a screen over a weekend is a different object from nine hours of somebody else's voice describing your own brain failing.
Readers deciding whether to spend an evening here should take the description at its word rather than assuming the usual arc. This is not an uplift narrative with one difficult act. The middle of the book is depression, uncontrollable rage, shame, isolation, and the loss of functions nobody thinks to be grateful for, all of it set down by someone watching a personality she no longer recognized take over her own life. The recovery is real, but it is slow, provisional, and littered with setbacks, and audio gives you no way to skim past the worst of it.
Nobody Has Assessed Gould's Actual Reading
Memoir listeners who want a first-person account of disability from the inside will find this unusually good, and the invisible-injury angle is the reason why. A traumatic brain injury leaves no mark anyone can see, which means the people around the sufferer keep waiting for the previous person to come back and keep being disappointed. Anyone living inside that dynamic, as the patient or as the family, will recognize the specific humiliations recorded here. Dog people will find a great deal too, subject to the warning above.
Listeners who need a memoir delivered in its author's own voice should know before buying that this one is not. Anyone currently fragile about animals, grief, or a neurological diagnosis of their own should approach the middle third deliberately rather than by accident. And anyone expecting a brisk recovery curve will meet something slower and more truthful in its place. Cat Gould's reading is the one element of this edition that nobody on the page has assessed, which makes it the part you will have to judge alone.
