"Ruth is my wife. She likes sugar in her coffee but not in tea. Shave every day." These simple instructions recorded in a file marked "Disease" capture succinctly the tragedy of Alzheimer's, the disorder that afflicts Ernie Mather in Mary Woodbury's novel Jess & the Runaway Grandpa. Ernie is fast becoming a stranger to family and friends, a turn of events that both saddens and angers twelve-year-old Jess Baines, Ernie's neighbour and surrogate granddaughter. Having endured years earlier the desertion of her drunken father, Jess is exasperated by the disease that now is "taking [Grandpa Ernie] away in bits and pieces," and she reacts quickly when Ernie-in a state of dementia-suddenly leaves in his truck to go fishing. Leaping in beside him, Jess accompanies her friend on a journey north of Edmonton that tests her mettle and resourcefulness as she struggles to keep both of them safe.

Woodbury is at her best when she takes the reader inside Ernie's ruined mind, eloquently depicting the ravages of Alzheimer's: "He sighed and thought of his favourite Hebrew scripture.. He would have it inscribed on his gravestone-he should write it down while he was lucid. But even as he thought of writing something down, Ernie felt the slow thrum of the fog in his head like a muffled roar of rapids in a rushing river."

She is less successful with the external elements of characterization. Dialogue is sometimes stilted, as when Ernie tells Jess, "Life without singing is pretty dull and has no soul." And characters often act in unrealistic ways. During a search for the pair, Jess's friend Brian sees a "hunk of lime-green neon fabric" caught on a log in the Athabasca River. But although he knows Jess goes nowhere without her lime-green sportsbag, Brian does not realize what he has seen until later. Other characters behave equally implausibly, such as when a young reporter who, having just met Brian, lectures the boy's father, "`You can't protect [Brian] forever. He needs to be doing this.' " Perhaps the greatest implausibility occurs after Ernie inadvertently sets fire to a rubber tire: Jess rolls the tire into the river, effectively dousing the very fire that would have alerted rescuers to their whereabouts.

Woodbury is heavy-handed with her messages, inserting several for her young readers in the novel's final pages: "Keeping in touch with those who care for you is important," explains Jess's mother, and Jess herself pronounces that "we need to remember to share the good as well as the bad." The most significant message in the novel, though, is the realization that Jess achieves in the course of their journey: "She had to learn to love the new Ernie somehow. Remember the old one and love the changed one." Surely this is the most important-and the most difficult-task of any person who must watch a loved one succumb to Alzheimer's. 

Don Aker lives in Middleton, N.S.