The Forgetting Time: A Novel

If I could give this book six stars (our of five) I totally would. How's this for a teaser:

Noah is four and wants to go home. The only trouble is he's already home.

The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin is the story of Noah and his Mum Janie. Noah has nightmares, begs Janie for his real mother and keeps asking when he can go home. Nobody can tell Janie what's wrong with her son despite visiting a whole host of specialists.

This novel covers themes of identity, death, mental illness, the possibility of re-incarnation and children who may (or may not) remember their previous life as well as an overarching theme of a mother's love for her son.

This topic is right up my alley (having read Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today by show more Trutz Hardo last year), and exploring the themes through this novel was a absolute thrill for me. At times I felt The Forgetting Time was written especially for me!

Sharon Guskin has clearly done her research and I knew I was in expert hands. I can't believe this is her debut novel; wow, what a way to burst onto the scene! Her writing is polished, and I admire her for extending the ending beyond what I was expecting. I got so much more out of The Forgetting Time than I thought possible.

I can't wait to see what she writes next and I have no doubt she'll be my favourite debut author of 2016.

Awesome, amazing, I loved loved loved it!

* Copy courtesy of Pan Macmillan Australia * show less

The blurbist on the front of this book is Jodi Picoult, so that was promising. And in Picoult fashion, the author has found a fascinating topic to weave a tale around: childhood memories of previous lifetimes. She even includes excerpts from a nonfiction study on the subject alternated with her fictional characters. Just learning about the existence of this subject made reading the book worthwhile. Janie Zimmerman is a single mom of Noah, who is a difficult child to say the least. At four, he is recalcitrant, has night terrors, an irrational fear of water (and bathing) and a precociousness that makes it hard for him to fit in socially with his peers. He is dismissed from multiple daycares and preschools and scares off scores of nannies show more and now various mental health professionals, and Janie, who runs her own remodeling firm in Brooklyn is at the end of her rope. Noah's typical lament is that he wants to "go home" and he wants "his mama", despite Janie's reassurances that she is his mother and 99% of the time they are home because he is so difficult to take out in public. Nothing soothes him (except TV). While online researching an anti-psychotic drug prescribed for Noah she stumbles upon the work of Dr. Jerome Anderson who has devoted his life's work to investigating children's former lives. This is really a thing and for some reason (cultural, mainly) is predominant in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India, ("In India, they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not...One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn't...they accepted this the way they accepted the monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense.") with a few isolated cases in America. ("Americans couldn't help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break...") First Janie has to wrap her head around this concept, then she has to trust Dr. Anderson that pursuing this will actually help Noah. An interesting contrast is that Anderson is suffering from terminal aphasia, so while his work is uncovering and delving into Noah's memory, he is methodically losing his own. From Janie's point of view "memory can be a curse." but for Anderson it is grace. How Noah and Janie's lives collide with the family Noah claims to remember and belong to is another interesting twist and leap of faith. Despite this wealth of material, the writing was a bit clunky and didn't always ring true, and the characters trended toward one-dimensional, so really this was more of a 2.5. show less

Wow. Just... wow. I stayed up way too late to finish this book. I flew through the last half, unable to put it down, growling at anyone who dared interrupt me while I was reading. I sobbed my way through a number of pivotal scenes. I was so engrossed in the characters and their plight. My daughter is 2 1/2, and this book affected me deeply as a mother. I don't think I would have had the same reaction to this novel if I wasn't a parent. But I am, and so both Janie and Denise's struggles resonated deeply with me. I found the book lyrical and moving, and the plot incredibly fast paced. I can't believe this is a debut novel! I'm excited to see what Guskin has in store for us next.

3.5 stars

Reincarnation is a Latin word, meaning "entering the flesh again."

The forgetting Time is an interesting and throught provoking novel exploring the idea of reincarnation and is also a mystery surrounding the disappearance of a child.
I picked up this novel on audio as was looking for something interesting to listen to and while I prefer Non-Fiction on Audio I was intrigued by the idea of reincarnation as brought up a Catholic reincarnation was a idea which I remember discussing in religion class but was quickly dismissed as not of the Catholic faith and therefore not up for discussion. How things have changed in today's religion classes as religion classes in school explore and discuss all different religions and young show more people have a better understanding of each other faith and beliefs.

While this is a fiction story it is well presented and the ideas explored certainly gave food for thought.
I kept thinking how would I deal with the situation presented to Janie and her young son Noah, would I have accepted the doctors diagnosis or took the road that Janie travelled. I found myself wondering who would I have been in a past life?

The Characters were well drawn and interesting and I especially liked the character of Anderson.

The performance of the narrators were very good and I enjoyed listening to this one. However one thing annoyed me in the story was the term " Mommy Mom" (thats just my silly niggle).

An interesting and thought provoking book. show less

When it comes to reincarnation, I’m like Mulder in “The X-Files” – I want to believe. What a wonderful concept to think that we have another life ahead of us with a second chance to live a better life.

Noah is a 4-year-old boy who lives with his single mom, Janie. She has always thought that he was precocious as he seemed to know about things he was never taught. But his terror of bathing is getting worse as is his longing for his “other mother” and his desire to go home, even when he’s in his own bed with Janie beside him. When the school gets involved, Janie knows that something more must be done to help her child.

Jerome Anderson is a psychology professor who has been diagnosed with aphasia and is gradually losing words show more and his understanding of language. He longs to have enough time to finish his work researching children who have memories of previous lives. Noah may be the child whose memories can help Jerry finish his work.

This is a book for everyone, no matter what your beliefs may be regarding any type of afterlife. It’s beautifully written and will touch your heart in so many ways. But be prepared to have your mind opened, if it isn’t already, to the possibility of lives other than the one you’re living at the moment. This fictional novel is very believable and contains quotes telling of actual case histories of children with memories of previous lives from the book “Life Before Life” by Dr. Jim Tucker.

This is Sharon Guskin’s first novel and it’s obvious that she’ll have quite a career ahead of her. This book has so many layers to it. It’s a thought-provoking study about reincarnation. It’s a suspenseful murder mystery. It’s a story about the strong bond between a mother and child. It’s the story of a man losing both written and spoken language and facing the end of his life. It’s about the connections that humans have to each other.

Highly recommended. show less

Janie's young son keeps saying he wants to go home and see his mother even when he is with her. He also has terrible nightmares and refuses to bathe. While researching on the internet some anti-psychosis medication prescribed for Noah, she stumbles across a psychiatrist who may be able to help. But he has his own problems.

I thought the main story about Noah tried too hard to convince the reader that was a real thing rather than just take it as a given, thus making it almost a polemic. I found Andersen's plight much more interesting and would have liked it to have been the main focus.

Author Sharon Guskin has created an engaging story that juxtaposes two very different people - an elderly, widowed professor suffering from a form of aphasia that will eventually rob him of his ability to understand language and a five year old child haunted by vivid and disturbing memories of a prior life. A man who will soon be unable to remember and a child who is unable to forget.

This book is not at all the sort of thing I normally gravitate towards. I've never read Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks nor, for that matter, any other bestselling author targeted to a female audience. And as an atheist, I make a point of completely avoiding Judeo-Christian propagandist clap-trap like Heaven is Real. And yet, something in the description of show more The Forgetting Time spoke to me, maybe it was the vaguely fantastic element of reincarnation [which is a huge part of the story]. For whatever reason, I decided to give it a go and was rewarded with a tight, well constructed story and a bunch of very believable and relatable characters.

Psychiatrist and researcher Jerome Anderson is in a race against time after receiving a dire diagnosis. Marginalized by the scientific community for his years of research into reincarnation, he must find a current American case study in order to convince an editor to publish his life’s work on the subject. This quest ultimately leads him to two very different families. Jane Zimmerman, a middle-aged single mother in Brooklyn is struggling to help her young son Noah, who is exhibiting disturbing behavioral issues, including an intense fear of water, apparent delusions and night terrors. And in Ohio, Denise Crawford is trying to come to terms with the fact that her beloved youngest son Tommy, who disappeared ten months earlier, may never return. Fate brings them all together and enables them to answer seemingly unanswerable questions, resolve their issues and heal their wounds.

Through the various characters, Guskin illustrate the basic human need for connection, whether it be a mother's overwhelming love for her child, the constant, tacit negotiations between a husband and wife or, on a larger scale, the professor's burning need to communicate his message to the world before it's too late. In addition to all that, it's also a sly murder mystery, which imbues the book with a page-turning urgency. For me, the most enjoyable thing about this was the author's obvious affection for all of her characters. Nearly everyone has their chance at the forefront of the story so we fully understand their points of view. The reader is even given the opportunity to see through the eyes of the ostensible "antagonist" of the piece, so that he becomes a fully realized human being and not some caricature of evil.

Perhaps I'm a bad person (or is it just that I'm not a mother?) because I admit I was mostly annoyed by Noah, the little boy who acts extremely bratty and fears water to the extent that he won't even wash his hands, let alone bathe. The semi-frequent references to his "sour" smell due to the never washing as well as his wholesale destruction of his mother's social life tested my patience to the max, but in the fullness of time, I found sympathy for him. Even despite that, I really enjoyed this book.

I would say it definitely has bestseller written all over it. And next? Maybe Hollywood. show less