A missing woman's past upends the lives of the women around her. In Wasserman's new novel, the author of Girls on Fire (2016) explores the lives of three women after one of them goes missing. Despite everyone telling her to move on, college student Alice is searching for her mother, who's disappeared. When she discovers her mother has gone missing before, she sets out to find her and the truth--which brings her to the door of Elizabeth Strauss. While working as a fellow at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research, Strauss, who at that time was going by the nickname Lizzie, was invited to join a once-in-a-lifetime project by "psychology's latest golden god," Dr. Benjamin Strauss (then her boss, now her recently deceased husband). The project? Studying Alice's mother, aka Wendy Doe, a woman found on a bus without identification or memories, who's in a dissociative fugue state. Wendy's perspective is also offered through lyrical diary entries in which she explores who she is, who she's not, and what's happening to her in the moment (which is all she has). Told in alternating perspectives by Alice, Elizabeth, and Lizzie, the novel is like a knot being slowly unraveled. While a bit disorienting at first, Wasserman's choice to differentiate between Lizzie's point of view (the past) and Elizabeth's (the present) succeeds narratively and thematically. By offering one woman's insights at different points in time, the novel explores the ways time, memory, and hindsight inform who we are and who we become. After completing an exercise where she lists every memory she's had in the last two weeks, Lizzie realizes: "Almost everything that happens is forgotten. Decades swallowed. Maybe...the mystery isn't why we forget some things and not others. Maybe the mystery is why we ever remember." In addition to meditating on personhood and recollection, Wasserman deftly explores power dynamics, ambition, and the lingering scars of trauma. A beautifully written exploration of identity, memory, power, and agency. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Wasserman's shrewd, beguiling follow-up to Girls on Fire unpacks the ways three women's lives are affected by a sexual predator. In 1999, a woman arrives in Philadelphia on a bus with no memory of who she is or where she came from. Dubbed Wendy Doe, she is placed into care at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research. Lizzie Epstein, the research fellow tasked with observing her by Dr. Benjamin Strauss, a semi-famous scientist and philanderer, spends her days conversing with Wendy and mulling over the implicit bargain of her affair with Benjamin, who promises to advance her career. The story flashes forward two decades, when Lizzie, mourning the death of Benjamin, who she'd married after he left his first wife, opens her door to Alice, the 18-year-old daughter of Wendy. Alice is looking for information about her mother, who has disappeared. Wasserman's prose starkly conveys the power sought and held by Benjamin ("Strauss believed in knowledge by colonization, understanding a subject by spreading across every inch of its territory until it was wholly possessed"), and she methodically moves the story toward a disturbing revelation about the connections among Wendy, Lizzie, and Alice. This examination of how one man in power can abuse the women closest to him delivers the goods. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Company. (July)

Eighteen-year-old Alice's mother, Karen, has disappeared and it isn't the first time. Before Alice was born, Karen spent a period of time at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research as Wendy Doe, studied for her complete loss of memory, under the observation of Dr. Benjamin Strauss and his protégé, grad student Lizzie. After Karen's second disappearance, Alice finds Lizzie, now known as Elizabeth, to see if she can provide any insight. Told in alternating chapters by Lizzie, Elizabeth, Alice, and Wendy, the novel weaves together the women's commonalities, which often revolve around their relationships with men and what they give up of themselves within those relationships. Wasserman (Girls on Fire, 2016) asks big questions about how well we can really know another person, the nature of truth as it relates to memory, and what this all means for how we perceive ourselves. While the novel takes a while to get moving, it ultimately has some great twists and all those questions Wasserman raises make it an excellent book-discussion choice.

The memory clinic has named her Wendy Doe, this total amnesiac with no known past. The clinic's "guest," she is being studied by eminent psychologist Benjamin Strauss and protégée Lizzie (soon, not surprisingly, to be his mistress). Some months later, Wendy's memory returns; she is Karen Clark, with a home and a husband. Some years later, Lizzie (now Elizabeth and Strauss's widow and a best-selling author) finds Alice at her front door. Alice's mother, Karen Clark, has disappeared, and Alice is seeking insight because Lizzie was close to Karen when she was still Wendy. Wendy, Lizzie, and Elizabeth narrate in turns. If it sounds a little soap opera-ish, it is, something the book lightly acknowledges, but the framework is sound. However, the narrative is interrupted frequently by side trips into scientific/psychological disquisition, Lizzie's ruminations on "mistress-hood," narrative theory, even soap-opera structure, and more. In the end, one unforeseen mystery is solved--Alice's paternity--but a larger one is not: What has become of Wendy/Karen this time? VERDICT For readers of stylish psychological thrillers who can be forgiven for skimming. [See Prepub Alert, 12/9/19.]--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY