four white mice and a rat or two
Betty wants to know what happened to her friends, after. Now she’s 81 and in a wheelchair. She hasn’t been outside of her house in a very long time. She needs help. So when Riley shows up to interview for the caregiver’s job, she is surprised that Betty is intelligent and engaged. Riley gets the job, but she’s not sure why. Betty seems to be living just fine all on her own.
Then she asks Riley to find out what happened to her friends.
When Betty was a young wife, she agreed to an experiment in the psychology department of a local college. She was offered a small amount of money for her time. The tests started with trying to tell what is on a card without looking at it, and then they went on to test other extra-sensory activities. There were 4 women chosen for their gifts—precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance—and as the testing continued, Dr. Trimble realized that combined their gifts were even stronger.
Kathleen was a stewardess, Helen was young and unmarried, and Ivy was pregnant. These women spent months together engaged in Dr. Trimble’s experiments, even when they were unpleasant. The women leaned on each other to endure the tests, as they were told that what they were doing was important.
But after an intense and painful several days in the lab, the women were exhausted and angry and hurt and desperate to go home. For the next few days, Betty was sleepy and disoriented, and then one day her husband showed up and started packing. He didn’t tell her why he knew, but he said that Betty was in danger, and they had to leave immediately. They grabbed a few things and tried to make it out of town, but they got into a bad car accident.
Betty was left in the wheelchair, and while she was recovering in the hospital, her husband bought a new house and had it outfitted for her. However, they had no television. He didn’t get them newspapers. They stayed at home, didn’t even talk to the neighbors, in order to keep Betty safe. Decades later, her husband passed, and Betty was alone. And she wanted answers.
Riley started by going back to the college town where the experiments had happened, but Betty couldn’t give her anything more than the names of her friends. Riley had to figure the rest out on her own. But as she starts researching what had happened to the other women and to Dr. Trimble, she finds out enough to make Betty think that someone has started up the experiments again. Now there are more women in danger, and Betty wants to stop the testing and keep them safe. But is Riley up to the task?
The Women in White is Sarah Pekkanen’s latest nail-biter, a psychological thriller that features strong women and those who treated them as white mice in their labs. Throughout the book are facts and figures about people’s opinions on ESP and the tests that were done on humans in the 1960s (and beyond).
I have mixed feelings about this novel. I thought the story was beautiful and beautifully written. I love these characters. But the indifference and cruelty of the tests and Dr. Trimble was infuriating and heartbreaking. It felt like watching a psychopath toy with its victims, and that was hard to read about. The fact that is was true, and these test were probably milder than ones that actually happened, just made it all more difficult. It’s a good story well told, but it’s also heartbreaking.
I listened to The Women in White on audio, narrated by Saskia Maarleveld with a lot more courage than I felt as a reader. I thought she did an amazing job with the painful scenes and with the heroic scenes. She really brought these women to life and made them shine, which I loved. There is a lot going on in this story, but I was so happy to have Maarleveld help me through it. If you are someone who has experienced trauma, control, or violence, then be careful with this book. It could be triggering. But if you are feeling brave like Betty and her friends, and you’re fascinated by stories of extrasensory powers or MK Ultra type experiments, then this may be the book you’ve been looking for.
Egalleys for The Women in White were provided by St. Martin’s Press, and an early copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.
