THE ONCE AND FUTURE ME

Virginia, 1954: A woman identified as Dorothy Frasier awakens on a bus en route to a psychiatric hospital. But does she belong there?

There are signs that Dorothy may not belong at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, most notably her lightning-fast reflexes and her ability to quickly calculate everything from how to pick a lock to the best way to beat a creepy orderly. And then there are the flashes of “memory” that seem to jerk her back to the future: 2035, to be exact. Here she is identified as rebel leader Beatrix “Bix” Parris, and reminded that she’s been sent to 1954 in order to intercept a virus that will wreak havoc in her present time, decimating 90% of the population. Back in ’54, these “delusions,” as well as Dorothy’s general lack of compliance, lead to a “protocol” which consists of heavy sedation and multiple sessions of electroshock therapy until her husband, Paul, intervenes. In the future timeline, Bix meets her twin brother and is filled in on all the details of their lives, the virus, and their roles in the fight, including the fact that she has less than 24 hours to find her Hanover contact and take action to save the world, fighting to find her allies and evade her enemies—and possibly face some other upsets in the timeline. This novel is a cinematic ride. The genre mashup is a little daunting and overly dramatic in the beginning, but once the intrigue—and then the dystopian action—kicks in, you might as well strap in and suspend disbelief. What’s real? We don’t fully know—and it really doesn’t matter. Dorothy/Bix is a kick-ass feminist hero, and the novel comments on the horrors of 20th-century mental health “treatments” for women as well as the anarchic ravages of a virus-infested world. The word bedlam was derived from a mental hospital so infamous it now stands for absolute chaos. This novel is “bedlam” in every way.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Hunger Games—and what an offspring!