The August heat is still refusing to let go, and after finishing the newest Riley Sager, I’m not quite ready to leave that eerie, mysterious mood behind. So here I am once again tucked away in my little garden sanctuary, iced coffee beside my Kindle, soaking up the afternoon sun and letting it kiss my skin into the prettiest late-summer bronze. Sarah Pekkanen always knows how to lure me into stories wrapped in secrets, and The Women in White felt like exactly the kind of mystery I needed to keep that spell alive.
The story follows Riley Bell, a recently divorced woman desperate for a fresh start when she accepts a job caring for Betty, an elderly widow who lives in a house that seems almost completely untouched by time. No television. No internet. No microwave. Betty recently had an accident that left her in a wheelchair, hence the need for Riley, but the more time Riley spends with her, the more I started wondering whether Betty really needed a caretaker at all. Maybe what she actually needed was a companion. And honestly, being lonely is hard enough, but being lonely and old just feels particularly cruel.
One of my favorite things about the book is that the story moves between the present and 1964, slowly revealing what happened to Betty and three other gifted young women who participated in a series of parapsychology experiments at a prestigious university. There’s something inherently creepy about watching these young women walk into those experiments knowing that, sixty years later, something clearly went very, very wrong.
And I’m sorry, Betty, but I did NOT trust you.
There was always something about her that made me feel like she knew considerably more than she was telling Riley. Eventually, Betty sends Riley searching for the women who participated in the experiments with her, and that’s when things get even stranger. Riley can barely find documentation proving these women existed. Records are missing, information leads nowhere, and sometimes the only evidence that they were ever there comes from surviving relatives.
Excuse me???
Someone clearly does not want the truth about 1964 coming out, and that immediately rubbed me the wrong way.
The experiments themselves have a very MKUltra-ish feeling to them, and this was also where the book surprised me because I genuinely wasn’t expecting it to lean quite so heavily into the paranormal/SF side of things. Telepathy, reading minds, strange abilities… at some point I genuinely stopped and thought: do we even consider mind reading science fiction? Impossible? Possible but extremely unlikely? I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE. Sarah Pekkanen had me questioning things I absolutely did not plan on questioning while drinking my iced coffee in the garden.
What disturbed me more than the supernatural element, though, was how these women were treated.
Reading the 1964 chapters made me angry because underneath all the mystery and strange experiments is something painfully real: women being dismissed, controlled, underestimated, and exploited by men who believed they were entitled to their bodies, abilities, time, and obedience. And every time the expectations placed on women during that period came up, my modern-day brain was basically screaming. Like, fuck you — if you expect me to have dinner waiting on the table every single night, you better be the best fucking husband alive and treat me like an actual princess.
I felt genuinely sorry for these women. Whatever abilities they may or may not have possessed, they were fascinating to the people conducting the experiments mainly because of what could be extracted from them. And that’s probably the part I disliked reading the most—not because it was badly written, but because I have a very hard time reading about women, animals, or honestly any living creature being subjected to experiments by people who have completely lost sight of the humanity behind whatever they’re trying to discover.
The doctor behind the experiments especially pissed me off. His motivation didn’t feel like some noble obsession with changing the world or discovering something that might genuinely help humanity. Underneath everything was something much uglier and much more selfish: he simply couldn’t stand the idea of being forgotten.
And people like that? Maybe being forgotten is exactly what they deserve.
Through all of this, I kept hoping Riley and Betty would develop a genuine friendship because these two women are lonely as hell in completely different ways. Riley is rebuilding her life after divorce, while Betty is sitting inside this strange little time capsule of a house surrounded by memories and secrets from sixty years ago. Their connection gave the present-day storyline a softer emotional layer that I really appreciated alongside all the WTF-is-going-on mystery.
Overall, I really liked The Women in White. It kept me completely hooked, constantly suspicious, and genuinely curious about what happened to those women in 1964. The paranormal aspect went further than I expected, and some of the experimentation storyline was uncomfortable for me to read, but the combination of forgotten history, female friendship, exploitation, buried secrets, and the question of whether something impossible might actually be possible made this such an interesting ride.
Eerie, weird, occasionally infuriating, and mysterious enough to keep me glued to my Kindle until I finally had answers.
Exactly the kind of book I wanted for these last hot, strange days of summer.
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