The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin
| The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Zoe Morris
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| Summary: One of the most interesting and intriguing books to hit the shelves in a long time, this is a must-read that will stay with you long after the final page | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 368 | Date: February 2016 |
| Publisher: Mantle | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1509806799 | |
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The Richard and Judy Book Club Autumn 2016
Janie is a single mother, living in New York with her pre-schooler Noah. It's just the two of them, so it's rather disconcerting when Noah screams out in the night, calling for his real mom and asking when he can go home. Night after night this happens. There's other things, too. He hates water and regularly goes to nursery stinky because his mother simply cannot get him in the bath. He has the odd bizarre turn of phrase that comes out, far beyond what one might expect for a child of his age. He knows certain things, too, without anyone understanding how he picked up this knowledge, whether it be the names of different reptiles or the plot of books he's never read.
When Janie is asked to remove him from nursery, because he's too disruptive she starts to panic and seeks out the advice of the city's top doctors. But is her beautiful little boy really suffering from schizophrenia? Before she starts him on powerful anti-psychotics, harmful to their usual audience 4 or 5 times his age, she seeks another opinion. Could Jerome Anderson, an international expert in his field, have a different perspective on what is troubling Noah? The start of the story led me to think someone else might be important in the long run, but he didn't turn out to be. In the end it's a threesome of Janie, Noah and Anderson who steal the show. And what a show it is. Interspersed with case studies from the 'real' (non-fictitious) world, this story had me mesmerised. I'm normally quite sceptical of pseudo-science, but in this case I was quite happy to reserve judgement and see how the story panned out.
I think what won me over was how likeable Janie and Noah are, and how real Anderson seemed. He has many reasons for wanting to help the pair, but even with his own motivation I never doubted that he wanted to make things better for Noah, to help ease his suffering. As the story progressed, this was exactly how it made me feel too. I wanted an answer. I felt there must be an answer, and I needed to find it, an explanation that would make everything clearer.
Thanks go to the publishers for sending us this book to review. It will appeal to fans of some of the most prolific modern authors. It reminded me in many ways of Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult, another book I enjoyed immensely.
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