The Women in White By Sarah Pekkanen

The Women in White is a fascinating look at a time in university history where ethics were blurred with devastating effects. 

Favourite Quote:

Betty isn’t drinking tea. I smell coffee. A glance into her cup confirms it. 

How could she know I prefer tea? My mind scrambles to find a logical answer.

Book Synopsis:

In 1964, four remarkable young women at a prestigious university became the subjects of parapsychology experiments by a visionary scientist. On the cusp of a historic breakthrough, the women mysteriously vanished and the program was erased from history. Decades later, Riley Bell, newly divorced and desperate for a fresh start, accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow named Betty. Riley steps into a home that is frozen in another era – no microwave, television, or cell phones, and Betty has never heard of the internet. Why has Betty lived in such profound isolation for so many years, and why does she need Riley now? As the story unfolds across two timelines – Betty’s 1960s era of 5 o’clock martinis and high-stakes experiments, and Riley’s quest to uncover the truth about the missing women – old secrets rise to the surface. And the only way to survive is to confront the mystery that has lingered for sixty years.

Review:

The Women in White flips between modern day where Riley is a caretaker for Betty, a paralyzed woman who has not been out of her house since the 1960s, and the past. In modern day, Betty is frozen in time. Her husband’s recent death and her own looming mortality has her requesting Riley track down some university friends she had before her life was seemingly frozen in time. As Riley looks into Betty’s life, she is surprised when it seems that Betty and her three friends don’t seem to exist in school records. But as she searches, she discovers that others have been looking before her and that records did exist and they’ve vanished. And Riley can’t help but feel like she’s being watched. 

In the past, the reader meets Betty, as she grows up, as well as Helen, Kathleen and Ivy. We spend time with them as children spread out all over the USA. Their childhoods are at times harsh in the 1930s and 1940s and they all have unexplainable knowledge that scares their families. Fast forward to the early 1960s where they are all trying to be their perfect women and housewives: beautiful, well-kept, keeping perfect homes, being there to serve their husbands. It’s uncomfortable at times to read about how much women were expected to be perfect and to ensure that their husbands just had to go to work and come home and never think about anything other than himself. This is, of course, a time where if women dealt with stress or nerves, they were heavily medicated or put into an asylum, without their consent. Husbands still controlled their wives as if they were children. 

During this time, Betty and the three women meet at a research institute where they have been selected to participate in because of their seemingly psychic abilities. Once in this research, which they aren’t given a chance to agree to but are coerced and forced into, their lives fall apart from the testing, the stress of keeping up a facade of perfection, and the intense drive by the all-knowing Dr. Trimble who is running the study. The study culminates in tragedy that tears the three women apart. 

Riley dives deep into discovering this horrific past and while she’s researching it becomes clear that someone wants to keep her and Betty quiet and will go to extreme measures to do so. And then, Riley becomes aware that young women in the present day on the same campus that Betty went to decades ago, are going missing and it seems that someone has started the research up again. 

The Women in White is a look into the dark ethical aspects of university studies in the past. Pekkanen did her research and based the book loosely on real life studies. It’s fascinating and horrifying all at once. I really was intrigued by this timeline and wanted to know more about the testing and why it was so dangerous. Because we only see the past from the perspectives of four very naive and sheltered women it was frustrating to not see the whole picture, which is of course part of the story. The story line vaguely reminded me of one of my favourite YA series growing up: The Dark Visions trilogy by L. J. Smith that focuses on a girl who can draw the future and who is also sent to a research institute where the studies tax their brains and threaten to break their sanity, much like in The Women in White.

I actually found the modern day story line to be lacking a little bit. There was a lot of suspense, and when Riley was out and researching it was interesting, but Riley as a character felt undeveloped and I wasn’t interested in her story arc much. There were a lot of loose threads in her story that felt like they were going to be important or go somewhere but then didn’t. I was much more engaged in the past and wished I could have spent more time there. 

All in all this was an interesting and engaging historical fiction with some mystery and supernatural elements. 

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.