I can’t recall how I first heard about this book, but I will admit that one of my favorite authors, Jodi Picoult’s quoted recommendation on the front cover, calling the book, “Provocative, evocative, fresh, Guskin’s book is an explosive debut,” may have played a part in my decision to check it out.
The beginning chapters focus on the lives of single mom Janie and her preschool aged son, Noah. Noah has always had a vivid imagination and loves telling, or rather making up stories. The problem is his preschool teachers aren’t too fond of the violent nature of the stories Noah shares with other kids. The content is based around very specific details about guns and being held under water until he can’t breathe. His wild imagination also leads to terrifying nightmares, where he often wakes up screaming for his mommy, even when Janie is sitting on the bed comforting him.
Janie is ordered by the school to get a psychiatric evaluation of Noah before he can potentially return to his classroom, and hopes that someone can tell her what is wrong with her son, fast. Frustrated with getting no answers from child psychiatrists and a potential diagnosis of schizophrenia, Janie turns to the internet to try and make some sense of her son’s issues.
She stumbles upon the work of Jerome Anderson, a professor of psychology, who has devoted his life’s research to studying stories of children who remember past lives. Janie isn’t sure if she can trust Anderson, but he might be the only hope she has to returning her life back to normal. It is from meeting Jerry (Jerome) that this book takes on a new direction, and the reader as well as Janie begins to get some answers to Noah’s bizarre behavior.
Guskin keeps the reader guessing throughout the multiple twists and makes one question if Noah’s story could happen to a child in real life. This book left me with a desire to further research this topic, (which might be the librarian in me), but Guskin’s excerpts from Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives by Dr. Jim B. Tucker and her acknowledgement of his other book, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives, meant I didn’t have to search very far for more information, especially since there are available copies of all titles at the Peabody Institute Library.