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In Focus: Imagine celebrating your birthday only every four years

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<p>When I taught middle school, part of my history curriculum was devoted to the development of religions. I taught Indian history for some of the year, which meant introducing students to the roots of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. For a mostly Judeo-Christian group of students, some of the ideas in Indian religions seemed foreign. They were particularly fascinated by the belief in reincarnation.</p><p>As someone raised Roman-Catholic, reincarnation is a strange concept that can be difficult - particularly for middle schoolers - to grasp. It&#8217;s not a common belief in Western culture, which is one of the issues at the heart of Sharon Guskin&#8217;s debut novel &#8220;The Forgetting Time.&#8221;</p><p>Janie Zimmerman is 39 and on vacation in Trinidad where she connects with a charismatic married man. On the beach one night, they unknowingly conceive her son, Noah.</p><p>Four years later, Janie is raising Noah alone in New York City, struggling to balance work and home life. Noah becomes more and more difficult: refusing to bathe, crying out in the night, begging to see his mama and recalling incredibly specific details of a life not his own.</p><p>Janie seeks the help of doctor after doctor, but no one has answers for her. She has grave concerns about medicating her son after one doctor suggests he may be schizophrenic. It isn&#8217;t until she catches a show about reincarnation that she begins to understand what may be going on with Noah.</p><p>At the same time, Jerry Anderson is a doctor who gave up a promising career to pursue the truth behind reincarnation. He followed stories around the world, primarily in Eastern countries that already believe in reincarnation and therefore see nothing strange about it. The Western world, however, is a different story.</p><p>Jerry is dealing with a devastating diagnosis of his own: aphasia. He is struggling to come to grips with losing his grasp on language when an editor asks him to revise his life&#8217;s work into a book marketable in America. This means finding one very strong American case, a challenge in an area of the world that doesn&#8217;t readily understand reincarnation.</p><p>And yet, there&#8217;s Noah. Noah, who recalls playing with a gun and is terrified of water and who only wants to be with his mother - a woman who clearly is not Janie. At her wit&#8217;s end, Janie seeks out Jerry&#8217;s help, without knowing Jerry&#8217;s diagnosis. A new, exciting case is what Jerry needs to publish his life&#8217;s work and reinvigorate him as he loses his ability with words.</p><p>Noah&#8217;s quest to &#8220;go home&#8221; brings them to the door of Denise, another mother struggling with grief after her son went missing. She never lost hope that Tommy will return, though. The stories Noah tells that confound Janie are much more familiar to Denise.</p><p>Is Noah Tommy reincarnated? If so, will meeting Denise &#8220;cure&#8221; Noah of his memories of the previous life and give him some peace?</p><p>&#8220;The Forgetting Time&#8221; is a lovely, well-crafted novel about grief, the afterlife and possibilities that the ones we loved and lost can return to us. It hardly matters whether one believes in the concept of reincarnation. Guskin draws her readers in by creating three dimensional characters, each of whom get their own perspective.</p><p>One nice touch is breaking up the chapters with real-life cases of children recalling details from previous lives. This research was done by doctors Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, Jerry Anderson&#8217;s real-life counterparts. While these stories took place mostly in the Eastern world, they lend credibility to Noah&#8217;s situation.</p><p>If nothing else, this novel opens the reader to intriguing possibilities about what happens after we die. It is a deeply emotional and engrossing story. The ending is drawn out a little too long, 90 percent of the book is an excellent read; hard to put down. I hope Sharon Guskin continues to craft such lovely novels.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Dorothy Sasso</p><p>On the Books</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><factboxMeta><p>&#8220;The Forgetting Time&#8221;</p><p>Author: Sharon Guskin</p><p>Page Number: 368</p><p>Publisher: Flatiron Books</p><p>Rating:&#9830;&#9830;&#9830;&#9830; 1/2</p></factboxMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Dorothy Sasso is a former Soap Opera Digest writer and a private school teacher. She is busy reading books and raising her daughter.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

On the Books: Exploring reincarnation through Sharon Guskin’s “The Forgetting Time”