This book took a long time to grab my interest...the foundation in the first third of the book took too long to build. The story is unconventional (to say the least), and the details are vital for its integrity, and some of the details seemed inconsistent and unbelievable. How could the main character leave her phone and wallet behind in 2018 and manage in NYC for 9 days, all while taking care of a young child? I just didn't find that feasible. The ending was fascinating, however. The potential is great, but I would have preferred some tightening.

Wow! This one drew me in right from the start and moved in unexpected directions throughout! If you loved a psych 101 class in school, like to decode other people’s dreams, or have felt curious about deja vu and premonitions… this book is for you. KTW has made it to the top of my favorite authors list!

I didn’t read a thing about this book before beginning it and I’m glad. What a wonderful and expected book that winds psychology up with our relationship to time. I loved reading from both characters perspective and while I suspected what was happening based on lots of readings I’ve done about quantum physics, this was one of the most unique ways I’ve seen it used in a story with the push and pull between possibility and “reality.” 5 stars. Thanks to netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

There is not a book Karen Thompson Walker can write that I will not immediately drop everything to read. After having just finished her newest novel, The Strange Case of Jane O., I want to drop everything and read it again. Twenty years after a brief one time visit with psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Byrd, Jane O. sees the doctor again following inexplicable events in which she enters a fugue state. Jane's impeccable autobiographical memory makes this fugue state even more confounding. Told from two points of view, Jane's and Dr. Byrd's, The Strange Case of Jane O. follows their separate journeys to try to understand Jane's mysterious time lapses. Quiet, well-written, thought provoking, The Strange Case of Jane O. is not to be missed.

I want to thank Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this novel in advance of the publication date! All my thoughts are honest and without bias from any outside source :)

After reading Karen Thompson Walker's "The Dreamers" just a few weeks ago, I knew I had to get my hands on more of her work. When I saw online that she had ARCs available for "The Strange Case of Jane O.", I requested it immediately. I am glad that I did!

On a general note, I love Walker's exploration of different realities in her novels. The use of alternate timelines, contextual understandings, and placement of people in the universe is all very intriguing to me, especially because she handles it in a very non-science fiction manner. This was a sentiment I carried through "The Strange Case of Jane O." I loved the idea of events taking place just slightly to the left of our reality and how that changes the way the reader perceives their universe. I was a big fan of this theme overall.

Our narrator, Dr. Byrd, starts as a very reliable narrator, with Jane being the unreliable character in our story, but this dynamic shifts as both of them become increasingly unreliable (or more reliable, arguably) as the story progresses. I think Walker did a wonderful job of allowing the reader to explore inconsistencies in Jane's story alongside Dr. Byrd's and piece them together as we learned more information. Between Jane's letters to her son and Dr. Byrd's notes, it was very interesting to figure out what was going on and whose stories were "true" only to find out that they both were.

It was obvious to me that the two main characters, Jane and Dr. Byrd, were written by a woman (and a mother at that) because they felt incredibly tender in their vulnerability surrounding grief, longing, and dreams for their children. I loved that even though Jane and Nico had not known one another for a long time, there was a world in which he was looking out for her and her son as an adult. Similarly, I found the conversations about Dr. Byrd's late wife's bookstore existing somewhere in the universe to be an incredibly comforting feeling. These were two very tender details that I truly enjoyed.

The only issue I had with this novel is that Dr. Byrd's previous missteps in psychiatric work made the story feel as if it should have turned more toward themes of a thriller or suspense novel when that was not the point of the story overall. I felt like I was supposed to be anticipating this revelation more to be a more pivotal point in his work with Jane, but it was not nearly as climactic as I felt the lead-up made it seem it would be.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and will continue to read everything that Karen Thompson Walker puts out because I think she has a very unique way of writing about what we can, and can't, see.

3.75/5

This novel is (kind of) short and easy to read, but contains heavy subject matter (including suicide, hallucinations, and dissociation). Jane O. claims to have perfect photographic memory, but is seeing things that can't be real, and losing hours of time with no memory. The book is written from two perspectives: Dr. Byrd, a psychologist writing his notes on Jane, and letters that Jane writes to her young son. There are several twists to keep the reader hooked, and I felt it wrapped up nicely.

Jane - 38, mother to a young child, living in NYC - might be an amnesiac. She also might be living in a fugue state. She could be from another world. She could also just be deeply mentally ill. It's unclear what plagues her, but Jane turns to psychiatrist Dr. Henry Byrd to help make sense of her black outs and the distress that accompanies them. The novel is written from Dr. Byrd's first person perspective and Jane's journal written as letters to her son. I thought The Strange Case of Jane O. was going to be a thriller, but it was much more introspective than that. SPOILER: The Strange Case of Jane O. is a perfect example of how to write about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The story of single mother, Jane O, reads like a realistic plot, but we find out it's labeled speculative fiction, sci-fi and fantasy. The themes of dissociative fugue or complex amnesia, premonition, and intuition are found in many novels, and brought together in this book.

I was intrigued by Jane's loss of memory when she doesn't remember any of what had happened in the days inbetween blacking out and waking up days later. That a closeness with her therapist develops, in spite of the doctor-patient relationship, is not surprising, though it is tentative, gradual, and subtle. But his narrative and her notes to her infant son reveal a lot about her state of mind.

The book made me want to study neuroscience myself, as it makes so clear how much we still don't know about how the brain and the complex ways the mind works.

This is the kind of book that you would be best going into without reading any of the reviews or summaries. I enjoy Karen Thompson Walker as an author, and I thought this book was unique from her other books, but still had me hooked the entire time in the same way. I could see this book as an anchor for a series, because at the end I was absolutely left wanting more. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, I was excited to get to read this one early.

I could not put this down. The Strange Case of Jane O. is eerie, provocative, and spellbinding, encompassing wide-ranging themes including love, loss, memory, fate, identity, and more. The novel alternates between the viewpoints of Jane, a single mother with a young son (in the form of letters from Jane to her son), and her psychiatrist (in the form of case notes). Jane finds herself struck by an inexplicable series of psychological afflictions and bizarre episodes. She goes missing for periods of time, suffers from amnesia, sees people and has experiences that do not seem possible or grounded in reality. Even how she found her psychiatrist in the first place is a bit of a hazy question mark. Is Jane suffering from a diagnosable medical condition, is she faking it all, or is something more uncanny, and perhaps otherworldly, at play? Jane's therapist is determined to find the answers, but in the process, he may very well find himself questioning events in his own life and his own reality. I thought this novel was beautifully written - just like Walker's prior novel, The Dreamers, which I absolutely loved.

I really enjoyed this! After part 3 I could not put this down.

The story has two perspectives - a woman who’s recently had a hallucination and her doctor. The doctor’s POV was told like a case study of her condition, and the woman’s POV is written as letters to her son. The unreliable narration definitely makes you want to keep reading, and the ending was satisfying in an eerie way.

I will admit it dragged a little in the middle, but it’s a shorter read and I’m so glad I got to read this!

Karen Thompson Walker’s “The Strange Case of Jane O” starts off so matter-of-factly, with a psychiatrist’s account of a case of his,
that it reads like nonfiction, though from the beginning it’s evident there’s something extremely odd about the young woman patient, with how she’s so unwilling to share the details of whatever prompted her to seek professional help. Indeed, she breaks off her relationship with the psychiatrist after the very first visit without ever disclosing exactly what brought her to the office. And the psychiatrist thinks that’s the end of what might have been an interesting case until he’s called in to assist when she turns up unconscious in a park with no memory, upon waking, of anything that happened to her in the previous 25 hours.
Especially strange, given her earlier visit with him and her reluctance to disclose exactly what had been troubling her, he thinks, but things get stranger still as she goes on to become his patient and, while still not remembering what brought her to the park, begins sharing details of other strange things in her life, including her having seen a male acquaintance she knows to be dead and telling of coming across a dead woman neighbor in her apartment building even though a detective later tells the psychiatrist there’s no evidence of anyone dying in her building. Strange too how the woman has a prodigious memory that enables her to remember the smallest detail of everything that has ever happened to her, though only those things that interested her.
Then comes another, longer blackout which raises concerns about the safety of her young son, though videos show him never having been in any danger, with her attentive to him throughout the episode, and which has the psychiatrist thinking he might be dealing with dissociative fugue, a disorder in which sufferers have been known to disappear without a trace only to turn up years later far removed from where they went missing.
A workable hypothesis even if it doesn’t completely cover the woman’s symptoms, thinks the psychiatrist, who has issues of his own, including his wife having been killed in an auto accident, which left him with the sole care of their young daughter and a propensity to reflect on such weighty philosophical matters as how the complexity of a universe arranged by divine design might be identical to the complexity of a universe that results entirely from chance.
And indeed there comes to be a possible complex philosophical explanation for all the novel’s strangeness which has to do with an actual global consciousness project which is either fascinating if you’re at all inclined toward the paranormal or “malarkey,” if you're of the mindset of the very terra firma-grounded computer science acquaintance of mine whom I asked to look into the project.
Either way, Walker’s novel, whose matter-of-fact prose blossoms as the narrow clinical orientation gives way to a wider philosophical scope, makes for an intriguing and provocative read, with a particular interest for anyone, like me, with a strong interest in abnormal psychology.