Blue — Sarah Van Arsdale

“I was taken from the beginning by the subtle, propulsive mix of lyrical and analytical prose in this compact but deep novel about identity and loss, memory and the moment, dream and the everyday life. Blue deals with the mystery of normal experience without clouding the events with so much misty plotting that the reader loses his way. At the same time, it moves along with ease without giving up its claims to seriousness. Best of all, it is a novel that rewards you immediately by its engaging story that rewards you after you read it by its pensive (and memorable) approach to the lives we live.”
- Alan Cheuse

On a rainy night in Intervale, Maine, and unknown woman appears on a bridge. “Blue,” as she comes to be known, has complete retrograde amnesia. Trying to recover fragments of her memory, she becomes the focus of the obsessions of local resident Rita LaPlatte, who attempts to prove that Blue is her “missing” twin. The amnesiac comes under care or Robert Reichman, a psychiatrist who is grappling with his own lost identity as a Jew. Also under the care of Dr. Reichman in Annie Blaise, a psychotic woman who holds the key to the question of both her own identity and Blue's, and answer not revealed until the book's last pages.

The Author: Sarah Van Arsdale, who holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College, teaches with the New York Writers Workshop at the Jewish Community Center in New York City and is senior staff writer at Designer Monthly Magazine. Her first novel, Toward Amnesia, was published in 1996 by Riverhead/Putnam. She lives in New York City and Vermont.