Finished Fr 1/19/18 The January selection for the Contemporary Book Club. I got this hard back from Amazon and received it on Fr 10/13/17- like new copy.
This is a 'page turner' that lived up to all expectations. It's a Thriller immersed in the theory of Reincarnation.
Noah Zimmerman is four years old and lives with his mother, Janie. He has always felt that his home is somewhere else, and he wants to go back to his 'real' family. He remembers drowning.
Dr. Jerry Anderson is a writer who is studying the phenomenon of 'past lives'. He wants to publish a new book, but his editor tells him he needs a contemporary case, and he finds the Zimmerman's.
Anderson brings Noah and his mother to a family that seems to meet the criteria that Noah remembers, but it's the wrong family.
Then, he finds the Crawford's. Denise had a son, Tommy, that is missing. Tommy has a brother named Charlie. This is an African-American family, and the Zimmerman's are white.
It unfolds that Tommy was accidentally shot by Paul Clifford, and then he dropped Tommy into an unused well and let him drown. Paul was showing Tommy how to shoot his father's rifle. He aimed at a metal bucket and the ricochet wounded Tommy. Paul goes on to become an alcoholic because of guilt from the incident.
From the book's page at Amazon-
"What would you do if your four-year-old son claimed he had lived another life and that he wants to go back to it? That he wants his other mother?
Single mom Janie is trying to figure out what is going on with her beloved son Noah. Noah has never been ordinary. He loves to make up stories, and he is constantly surprising her with random trivia someone his age has no right knowing. She always chalked it up to the fact that Noah was precocious―mature beyond his years. But Noah’s eccentricities are starting to become worrisome. One afternoon, Noah’s preschool teacher calls Janie: Noah has been talking about shooting guns and being held under water until he can’t breathe. Suddenly, Janie can’t pretend anymore. The school orders him to get a psychiatric evaluation. And life as she knows it stops for herself and her darling boy.
For Jerome Anderson, life as he knows it has already stopped. Diagnosed with aphasia, his first thought as he approaches the end of his life is, I’m not finished yet. Once an academic star, a graduate of Yale and Harvard, a professor of psychology, he threw everything away to pursue an obsession: the stories of children who remembered past lives. Anderson became the laughing stock of his peers, but he never stopped believing that there was something beyond what anyone could see or comprehend. He spent his life searching for a case that would finally prove it. And with Noah, he thinks he may have found it.
Soon, Noah, Janie, and Anderson will find themselves knocking on the door of a mother whose son has been missing for eight years. When that door opens, all of their questions will be answered.
Gorgeously written and fearlessly provocative, Sharon Guskin’s debut explores the lengths we will go for our children. It examines what we regret in the end of our lives and hope for in the beginning, and everything in between."
From Amazon and this book is a non-fiction account of this phenomenon; Guskin read this book before she wrote her novel-
"OLD SOULS; COMPELLING EVIDENCE FROM CHILDREN WHO REMEMBER PAST LIVES (2001)
For thirty-seven years, Dr. Ian Stevenson has traveled the world from Lebanon to suburban Virginia investigating and documenting more than two thousand of these past life memory cases. Now, his essentially unknown work is being brought to the mainstream by Tom Shroder, the first journalist to have the privilege of accompanying Dr. Stevenson in his fieldwork. Shroder follows Stevenson into the lives of children and families touched by this phenomenon, changing from skeptic to believer as he comes face-to-face with concrete evidence he cannot discount in this spellbinding and true story."
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