The Once and Future Me
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Dark Matter meets Girl, Interrupted in this gripping psychological thriller about a young woman teetering on the edge of reality.
Virginia, 1954. When a woman wakes on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life before that moment, none of the dark things she must’ve seen and done that forged her into the skillful and cunning fighter she is. Doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed for her violent delusions. She’s certain they’re wrong—until disturbing visions of a dystopian future in which frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission” and save mankind begin to invade her reality.
Believing it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one and focuses only on escaping—until there’s a visitor. A man whose loving face—and touch—she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions, because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier.
Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her husband and doctors’ plans for her treatment, and she might save herself. She needs answers, but to get them she’ll have to harness the darkness inside her as she risks her freedom, her mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An amnesiac is either a time traveler or a hallucinating schizophrenic in Pace's suspenseful if somewhat overstuffed debut. When the narrator wakes in 1954 Virginia at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she can't recall who she is or why she's there. Though she's wearing the patient ID of someone named Dorothy Frasier, the wisecracking voice in her head insists she's neither Dorothy nor a patient. After a fight lands her in seclusion, the woman unexpectedly journeys to 2035, where "nerds" insist she's a soldier named Bix searching the past for means to cure a deadly virus. Back in 1954, doctors deem the narrator delusional, a diagnosis she reluctantly accepts when a man identified as Dorothy's husband visits the hospital and she recognizes him. Despite undergoing electroshock therapy, however, the narrator keeps returning to the future; either she's truly Bix, or Dorothy is destined for a lobotomy. The sci-fi aspects of the plot are at once overcomplicated and underexplained, but the harrowing hospital scenes ground the proceedings and spotlight science's historical mistreatment of "inconvenient" women. There's enough here to hold adventurous thriller fans' attention.
