#BlogTour ‘The Strange Case Of Jane O’ by Karen Thompson Walker

About the book…

In this spellbinding novel, a young mother is struck by a mysterious psychological affliction that illuminates the eerie dimensions of the human mind—and of love. A provocative literary puzzle from the New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Age Of Miracles’

In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.

‘The Strange Case Of Jane O’ is published on March 20th, by Bonnier Books , my thanks to the publishers and Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers

Ghosts, spirits, premonitions or wishful thinking?

The seemingly inexplicable and implausible collide in this story of Jane O, the pseudonymous patient of Dr Henry Byrd, psychiatrist, who meets her one afternoon and becomes entangled in the life of both Jane and her son Caleb.

The narrative is told from 2 perspectives-the first person narration of Henry and the diary entries of Jane’s notebooks which she is leaving to future Caleb, her 1 year old son.

As Henry tries to look deeper into why Jane has come to see him, his search for a diagnosis and answer to how she could have met a person who died 20 years ago, the year she insists she first met Dr Byrd, and feels her grip on what she believes is reality is slipping.

As Jane has no real identity for the reader, we are relying on Henry to be the voice of reason, the scientific answer for the nebulous experiences Jane has come to discuss. Except… he reveals small and subtle details that lead the reader to doubt his veracity as a stable narrator of dates, times and fact.

In contrast, Jane remembers everything. 

She can even recall all the items on Henry’s desk the first time they met. Name a date and she will tell you not only what was on the front page of the newspaper that day what day of the week it was. And she is never wrong.

So there you have this immense city, New York, 2 defined characters-but are they really?-and background characters who are indistinct if they are named, but most of them aren’t.

The mystery of what happened and why Jane vanished, and cannot remember what happened to her after seeing Dr Byrd is one thing. When she disappears again, for longer this time, with her 1 year old son, this becomes a police matter.

What is concrete is that what Jane experiences is absolutely real to her.

The death of a high school companion when she was 17, the neighbour she found dead, alongside her rabbit is alive and kicking.

The vision of Nico, her high school companion who killed himself, telling her to get out of the city, presenting as a middle aged doctor, is a prelude to what we have lived through over the past 5 years in a pandemic era.

This endears her to the reader, I was deeply concerned about her and Caleb’s welfare through the entire book, reading both sides and still having less than a nebulous idea of what and where the story was going. But absolutely absorbed in this beautiful, fever dream of a novel.

It reminded me of the books of Claire Messud, capturing time and place whilst cleverly fixing the narrative and characters to neither and both.

Is Dr Byrd a discredited psychiatrist using Jane for his own reasons?

Does Jane have a psychiatric disorder, such as puerperal psychosis, amnesia or fugue state?

Is she lying about everything she tells Dr Byrd, and by extension, us?

How far do we go in our beliefs that we would will someone who shouldn’t, couldn’t exist into being in front of you?

This is a fantastic, really layered story that I will continue to pick at and over, Jane O has reached into my subconscious and is tugging something apart there. And how willing I am to let this book continue creating a sense of danger, premonition and prescience will depend on the number of times I read it. I feel there is more to discover and to lose yourself in this story is such a privilege.

About the author…