The Forgetting Time

December 1, 2015
A single mom confronts the possibility that her troubled 4-year-old is the reincarnated spirit of a murdered child. Thirty-nine-year-old Janie Zimmerman becomes pregnant after an interlude with a stranger while on vacation in Trinidad. Four years later, her son, Noah, is kicked out of preschool because he's talking about guns, drowning, and the scary parts of the Harry Potter books. He constantly asks Janie if he can go home now and if his other mother is coming soon; he absolutely refuses to take a bath. Attempts to address this situation by visiting psychiatrists and specialists result only in draining Janie's savings and in a tentative diagnosis of early-onset schizophrenia. In her desperation, she gets out a bottle of bourbon and Googles the words "help" and "another life." She ends up watching a documentary featuring Dr. Jerome Anderson, "who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives." But Anderson is having troubles of his own. Still staggering from the death of his wife one year earlier, he's been diagnosed with aphasia, a form of dementia that involves the gradual loss of language. Though his work has been jeered at by the scientific community, he's now written a book for the general public which has been accepted for publication by "one of the top editors in the field," who requires only that he add one more compelling case history. His phone call from Janie Zimmerman will provide that opportunity, but will his mental faculties hold out long enough for the threesome to solve the mystery of Noah's past? The novel includes many excerpts from a real book called Life Before Life: Children's Memories of Previous Lives by Jim Tucker--these describe real-life cases of apparently transferred memories. Guskin's debut novel tells a sentimental story with a murder mystery at its core, and it's interesting even if you don't go for the premise.

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Starred review from December 15, 2015
Guskin came to fiction as a documentary filmmaker who volunteered at a refugee camp in Thailand, an experience that inspired the deeply provocative theme of her ensnaring and unsettling first novel, The Forgetting Time. We bond right away with Janie, a lonely, 39-year-old architect, and psychiatrist Anderson, who is grieving over the death of his wife and adjusting to an appalling diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. This form of dementia will slowly and inexorably destroy his command of language, a cruel fate amplified by Anderson's ardent devotion to his controversial research into the survival of consciousness after death, specifically reincarnation. As Anderson struggles to continue his investigations of children who remember past lives, we rejoin Janie, who is now a single mother wrung down to raw nerves by the inexplicably disruptive behavior of her strangely precocious, anxious son, Noah, who is forever asking for his other mother. In vivid flashbacks, we accompany Anderson as he meets families with children who remember past lives in Thailand and India, where reincarnation is part of the culture, unlike America, where his findings are summarily dismissed by his colleagues. As Anderson, Janie, and Noah follow the clues in Noah's enigmatic memories, unlikely under-siege relationships develop as the searchers cross racial boundaries. Readers will be galvanized by Guskin's sharply realized and sympathetic characters with all their complications, contradictions, failures, sorrows, and hope. Deftly braiding together suspense, family drama, and keen insights into the workings of the brain, Guskin poses key and unsettling questions about love and memory, life and death, belief and fact. A novel that bridges the fuzzy categories of literary and commercial, The Forgetting Time offers a vast spectrum of significant and nuanced topics that will catalyze probing discussions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2015

Even as crisis rocks unsettled four-year-old Noah and his single mother, Janie, once-promising academic Jerome Anderson receives a diagnosis that shuts down his future. Further revelation comes when all three meet a mother whose son has long been missing. A Publishers Lunch buzz book with rights sold to ten countries; big library promotion, too.

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