Dear Author,

When I found this e-arc on NetGalley I flipped out with happiness! I love your books, your wonderful pros, your characters well flushed out and relatable, plus you always have great twists. This book was fantastic! I'm already handselling this at my store!

Warmest Regards,

J.D. McCoughtry

Thank you, NetGalley and Random House for this e-ARC.

The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker is a thought-provoking exploration of memory, identity, and the complexities of the human mind. The novel follows Jane O., a 38-year-old single mother who experiences unexplained blackouts and hallucinations, leading her to seek help from Dr. Henry Byrd, a New York City psychiatrist. As their sessions progress, both Jane and Dr. Byrd confront unsettling questions about reality and consciousness.

Walker's writing is both profound and evocative, drawing readers into a speculative mystery that intertwines psychological intrigue with emotional depth. The narrative structure, presented through Dr. Byrd's clinical notes and Jane's personal letters to her son, offers a unique and intimate perspective on their evolving relationship and the enigmatic circumstances they face.

While the novel's deliberate pacing allows for deep character development, some readers may find the progression slow, particularly in the middle sections. Additionally, although the open-ended conclusion might raise interesting questions, it's also possible that it might leave those seeking clear resolutions somewhat unsatisfied.

Overall, The Strange Case of Jane O. is a compelling read that challenges perceptions of reality and self. It is well-suited for readers who appreciate literary fiction infused with psychological and speculative elements. Three and a half stars rounded up.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of this book. It was published on February 25, 2025.

THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker is a genre-bender of a novel that had me hooked from the jump. Told partially from the point-of-view of Jane’s psychiatrist, and partially in the form of diary entries that she addresses to her son, we learn three things about Jane very early in the book: 1) she goes missing for a day, and when she comes to in a park in Brooklyn, she has no memory of what happened during that time; 2) shortly before she went missing, she had a hallucination; and 3) otherwise, she has a near-perfect memory. I think it’s best to go into the book not knowing any more than that!

This is a surprisingly plot-driven novel, as Jane and her psychiatrist try to understand what is going on in her brain. The reader’s understanding of events is constantly shifting as additional information is provided. I think the two points-of-view Walker used (the psychiatrist and Jane herself) really worked to keep me off-kilter throughout the book - I would think I knew what was going on, and the other person’s perspective would completely flip that on its head.

I’m not sure how to categorize this book; it’s not quite a thriller - maybe a literary mystery? But it’s definitely a page-turner. I was squeezing in pages whenever I could! I’m struggling to think of comp titles for this one; it’s really unlike anything I’ve ever read. I know this was an Aardvark pick this month and I’m excited that it will get into a lot of people’s hands - if you’ve read it, let’s discuss!

Thanks so much to @netgalley and @atrandomhouse for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review!

I felt that this book was a huge run on sentence. There was no depth to the description of the character or the plot. It read largely like a continued list. I almost DNF’ed this book but I felt an obligation to finish the Arc. I will not be reviewing this book on my social accounts, as I don’t like giving bad publicity to authors.

The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker surprised me by starting in one place and taking me somewhere much stranger than I expected. This novel was a quick read that starts from the perspective of a psychiatrist who welcomes Jane, a new patient with highly accurate memory. Jane leaves the session early and then lists the psychiatrist as her doctor when she shows up in the ER following a blackout with no memory of where she has been for the previous day. The novel is told from two different perspectives and is interested in character, memory, and time. I read the novel in two days. While initially I was nervous about the set up of a patient and psychiatrist, the mysteries of each character unfolded in a way that was highly readable and interesting. After enjoying both The Age of Miracles and The Dreamers, I should have expected this novel to also be speculative fiction. Because I did not, it snuck up and surprised me in the best way.

I loved this book. It explored a character’s experience with memory and reality and her psychiatrist’s attempts to reconcile her experiences with reality. Should he give her a diagnosis or accept the possibility that she experienced an alternative universe? For me it conveyed the sense of unreality that can be felt in tempestuous times when you hope you will wake up and find that it was all a dream.. Jane and her experiences were so well conveyed by this author that I was thoroughly moved.

This book is based on alternate universes, which I normally shy away from. But I’’m so thankful I gave this story a try. The characters are well described; I felt like I was watching a documentary. Concise with never a dull moment, I was on edge trying to understand how this was going to unfold.
Thanks so much to Random House Publishing Group- Random House for an ARC in exchange for my honest review. The publishing date is February 25, 2025.

I dislike the cover- so much I almost didn’t request this title from Net Galley. I had previously enjoyed another title by this author, and the description was intriguing so I did ultimately request and was granted access.
The book draws you in. It’s a puzzle you are putting together, and when it’s almost complete, you find out there is pictures on both sides of the puzzle pieces. So do you have a full understanding or is it altered?

It is a book I will continue to think about and would recommend.

This fantastic literary thriller will keep you reading well past your bedroom.

Jane, new mother, is struck by a mysterious syndrome—she is experiencing hallucinations, visions of people she knows are dead, and finally missing time. She is found in Prospect Park and the thought that this happened and she left her baby sends Jane to a therapist. Jane and her therapist become closer and their travels through her experiences cause them both to uncover truths about the true nature of the reality they live in. This was an amazing book—part literary musing on motherhood and part medical mystery.I couldn’t put this down.

I absolutely loved this book.

It is about a psychiatrist treating a patient who keeps having blackouts. It is told from the psychiatrist's POV in the form of something he intends to keep secret. He begins to develop unprofessional feelings for Jane and is way too wrapped up in her case. The second POV is Jane's told through letters she leaves for her infant son. The letters read more like diary entries. Jane experiences blackouts and keeps disappearing. Her doctor thinks it is a mental or medical condition, but the police think she is faking.

I got so wrapped up in getting to the truth of this one. The book has a touch of sci-fi or maybe just the not yet known. As I got to the end, I started to predict what was happening to Jane, but it didn't take anything away when my suspicions were confirmed.

I recommend this one if you like books that rely on psychological aspects.

I really enjoyed The Strange Case of Jane O. This is told in alternating perspectives between Jane and her psychiatrist. It’s hard to tell much without spoiling - so will just say that Jane starts to experience some unusual events. It’s so tough to tell if we are reliable narrators in our own lives and if Jane and Dr Byrd can trust what she says. This one went in some really interesting directions and I enjoyed being along for the ride. Thank you to the publisher for the gifted book!

It is a testament to great writing when an author can evoke a mood, a tone, an unnerving sense of imbalance with just a key choice of words and pauses. This book is remarkable in its quiet. It creeps up on you and bowls you over in the end. I was captivated and intrigued all the way through, and unusual for me, surprised by the ending. Surprising also was how much I was rooting for these two lonely souls to come together. But the brilliance of this book is that we don’t know if they actually ever do.

“𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 - 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯’𝘴 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺.“

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing this advanced readers copy. I love The Dreamers so when news of this one came out I promptly added to my tbr.

As a psych and mental health worker, I immediately was drawn to this mystery. Told in six parts, featuring either chapters from the psychiatrist’s POV or brief entries/letters from Jane, we get the whole story and I appreciated that we got into both of their minds. As I read on I grew both unsettled (due to some personal parallels of psych and/vs law) and curious (what was going on with Jane?) as I read it with these unreliable narrators and the psychological depth that gets explored.

“𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦’𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴.”

It’s a challenge to know what to say without spoiling anything but I liked it and I like it in the same ways I enjoy The Dreamers: the ethereal atmosphere, the psychology, the connections between characters, the unraveling of the story, the way it concludes. It’s the ways it’s subtle yet not simultaneously. There are the facts of the story and the underlying themes, the overall vibe, that creates a unique reading experience and you’re left reflecting. Or at least I was, especially with how it ended.

Content includes mentions of a death by suicide (often brought up, off-page), loss of spouse, mental health and hospitalizations.

Loved this totally different story. This is not going to be for everyone but I really enjoyed it. I didn't love The Dreamers but really enjoyed this one.

Jane is having mental issues. Dr. Byrd the MD trying to get her diagnosis. The story is told through Dr. Byrd’s reporting on their meetings and Jane’s letters to her young son. Initially I found the medical mystery aspect of this compelling. Were these events really happening or is Jane an unreliable narrator? What would cause such gaps in her memory? However, by the end of the book, I was getting tired of the story and I found the conclusion very unsatisfying. I’m not sure that I can recommend this one but I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Initially, the thing that attracted me to this book was the author. I read The Dreamers years ago and really liked it. This book does have the same mysterious air - we're figuring the weirdness out with the characters, not just having them tell us why its weird - but I do feel like the mystery in Dreamers is definitely more urgent and it helps drive the story more. But, even saying that, I was intrigued enough.

The majority of the book is told via a report that the psychiatirst is writing about his encounters with Jane so you feel like youre getting a solid timeline of whats been happening to her. But then! the story starts to be told in journal entries from Jane to her infant son, meant for him when he's grown, and the events recorded there are very different. I love the discord that happens in my brain when I realize one of the characters is an unreliable narrator and how the story could end in a really different spot depending on which one is it.

Like I said above, sort of a slow build up to the "conflict" but it held my attention in the end. If youre into psychology/psychiatry, this is probably a good read for you. The acknowledgements say that KTW did a fair bit of research and was highly influenced by books from Dr. Oliver Sacks, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I have also read and thought was really interesting.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for providing the advanced reader ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Karen Thompson Walker is such an inventive and unique writer and The Strange Case of Jane O. does not disappoint. I think the book would be best enjoyed knowing as little as possible about the premise. The story unfolded like a literary puzzle and contains elements of science fiction and suspense. A speculative mystery about love - this made for an unforgettable read.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC.

An intriguing book with not one but two unreliable narrators. I loved the psychological component to the storyline. Written like case notes for the one narrator and like letters from the other proved to be an interesting way to tell this story. I’m forever astounded by an authors ability to have an idea for a book and then to develop it so well. Karen Thompson Walker does not disappoint in this regard. I’d recommend this book to others who enjoy psychologically complicated themes. I special thanks to netgalley for the arc!

I have always enjoyed Karen Thompson Walker's books, and this one does not disappoint. She always has an element of magical realism or science fiction to her reads that make it a bit more interesting and has you guessing. I loved the premise of this and the timelines of what is real, what is not along with the aspect of an epidemic that made this an enjoyable read. Another winner for KTW!

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC!

Karen Thompson Walker thrives in worlds where disaster is king. During an interview on NPR just before publishing her second novel, The Dreamers, she described the draw to calamity and how it fires her imagination. It’s her way of looking at the world through ordinary people. For her third novel, The Strange Case of Jane O. slated for release in February, she again visits the world of disaster but from a subtle and more evolved perspective. To be clear, I am a fan of her speculative work with her debut The Age of Miracles comfortably maintaining its position atop my list of top fiction works. I often quote the opening line from that book as one of the greats in modern literature.

What’s interesting about her latest work is how it ended in such a seemingly anticlimactic way. As with her two previous novels, the speculative part of her fiction demands a moment of reflection. In The Stange Case of Jane O., that reflection means considering why she’s chosen a story that seems so small in contrast to her others. In The Age of Miracles, she gives us an expansive and complex story that is global in nature, even though it’s told through the eyes of an eleven-year-old. The rotation of the earth is slowing with catastrophic results that are played out economically, politically, and existentially. In The Dreamers published in 2019, the crisis manifests through a deadly and incurable disease that causes a type of sleeping sickness. The scale of the drama is smaller—a single fictional community in California—but has again, wider implications of fear, isolation, and survival. Both novels focus on the perspectives of ordinary individuals—personal stories that drive the narrative. The Strange Case of Jane O., is confined to bits of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, and Park Slope, and just a slice of Manhattan. It’s a world just a few miles in diameter. Further confines include the few characters in her story. Besides Jane O. and her psychiatrist, Henry Byrd, there are but a handful of characters. The narration reverberates back and forth between the psychiatrist who uses his notes and recollections to tell the story, and Jane, who’s drafted journal entries addressed to her infant son, intended that he should better understand his mother’s mental illness when he’s older. Both characters are unreliable for different reasons, which might lead to contradiction and even conflict in their respective accounts. Such departures in narration can create a beautiful tension, causing us to determine what if anything in the respective accounts are true. However, given the relationship between doctor and patient, both narratives tend to validate the perspectives of the other, if not completely explain away the contradictions. It tends to diminish the appeal of such unreliable storytellers.

The challenge though is not just the interplay of the narratives alone, it is the characters themselves who offer a complicated though underdeveloped relationship. The psychiatrist works hard at maintaining his clinical boundaries, especially with his well-documented, previous ethical challenges. Those boundaries get stretched in what seem like unavoidable ways. He is intrigued by Jane’s affliction, so much so that his enthusiasm for run-of-the-mill neurotic New Yorkers seems to wane. While you would expect that any clinician might enjoy one patient more than another, and for mental health clinicians, one psychosis over another, Dr. Byrd’s challenges bode from a keen interest in the illness, to a fondness for the patient. That particular sense is the problem—the sense that the attraction he experiences does not really make its way into Thompson Walker’s three-hundred-page book. She sets the stage—widowed husband with a young child, treating a young single mother also with a young child. Apart from their kindred spirit, he never fully expresses his desire for her. Again, it’s the exasperating professional ethics that inhibit him from declaring his longing for his patient. I’m not certain that he needed to be quite so careful in his narrative. Regardless, it leaves things underbaked.

Jane can be forgiven a lot—because of her son, because of her illness, because she seems destined to live her life in what might be described as a bifurcated way. Her days are forever being interrupted in a manner that no one would or could ever believe, except her psychiatrist. I’m not sure that’s enough to develop a longing for him. Understanding, a shared experience, parental camaraderie—these are the things that may lead to friendship, and maybe over time to something more. Jane’s journals do not develop such a thing, and they probably shouldn’t, seeing that they are intended for her adult child to read. Again, if the mechanics of the narrative forbid such a thing, then perhaps there is something sensible about it all. In the end we needed a peek at what was going on under the surface for both of them. Otherwise, it’s just a lot for the reader to manage.

There is more to manage as Thompson Walker introduces us to hyperthymesia, a rare brain condition that allows one to recall vivid details of daily life experiences often over many years, and dissociative fugue, a rare type of amnesia causing patients to black out sometimes for days at a time. Dr. Byrd ascribes these conditions to Jane, even though the likelihood of being afflicted with both is infinitesimally small. His sense of skepticism is muted as he struggles to explain Jane’s disappearances and memory lapses. What are the odds? Unless the two conditions are related in some way. As the novel slowly works out why Jane’s ultra-reliable memory sometimes fails her, and why her amnesia seems to have a peculiar side-effect, the story becomes reminiscent of The Dreamers. In both novels, we find out that all is not what it’s supposed to be. In The Strange Case of Jane O., Thompson Walker asks us to consider the existential question of whether time and dimension are just constructs for humans to make sense of their existence, rather than having to reconcile Jane’s strange illness as something of an odd and implausible coincidence. In the end the psychiatrist seems to be a believer, even if his judgement is clouded. In his desire to accept the fantastical, he offers this:

“It’s easy to believe in nothing. It takes no courage to dismiss the unlikely.”

Even in the final page of her novel, Thompson Walker begs us to consider the possibility as Jane narrates her final moments with Dr. Byrd. In one of her realities—their realities, doctor and patient don’t have to part even if professional ethics dictates that they must—somewhere the yearning ends. That’s where Thompson Walker lets us off—with happy endings, all neatly tied up. The thing is she’s really about to drop us off the precipice. Again though, it requires a bit of reflection. She never tells you what’s about to happen. It is the genius in The Strange Case of Jane O. After putting the book down finally, you realize there is something cruel about what we’re left with. As in The Dreamers, Thompson Walker lets the threads unravel without tying anything together—really. We are at an end and the sum of all that’s happened is left for you to sift through. It’s an awful-beautiful ending in which what isn’t said, what is so obvious to anyone, to everyone who reads this book and hasn’t been asleep in the last five years, will no doubt understand. For its imperfections, The Strange Case of Jane O. forces you to reconsider what you know to be true, and for that alone her novel is something that should be read, if only to relive and reflect.

(Note: This review is provided courtesy of the Midnight Book Club, which received a digital galley proof of this book prior to its release from Random House Publishing through NetGalley. All Midnight Book Club reviews are uncompensated and reflect honest assessments of these works.)