The Once and Future Me: A Novel Book Cover The Once and Future Me: A Novel
Melissa Pace
Time Travel Fiction; Psychological Thriller
Henry Holt and Co.
August 19, 2025
Ebook, Audiobook, Hardcover
384

Dark Matter meets Girl, Interrupted in this gripping psychological thriller about a young woman teetering on the edge of reality.

Virginia, 1954. When a woman wakes on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life before that moment, none of the dark things she must’ve seen and done that forged her into the skillful and cunning fighter she is. Doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed for her violent delusions. She’s certain they’re wrong―until disturbing visions of a dystopian future in which frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission” and save mankind begin to invade her reality.

Believing it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one and focuses only on escaping―until there’s a visitor. A man whose loving face―and touch―she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions, because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier.

Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her husband and doctors’ plans for her treatment, and she might save herself. She needs answers, but to get them she’ll have to harness the darkness inside her as she risks her freedom, her mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.

Melissa Pace delivers a haunting feminist twist on dystopian fiction with The Once and Future Me.

Melissa Pace’s The Once and Future Me is a novel that blends science fiction, psychological thriller, horror, dystopia, and feminist fiction. It is such a cool and unique story that I was drawn right into it.

Dorothy Frasier wakes up on a bus to Hanover Psychiatric Hospital in Virginia, 1954, with no memory of who she is. What she does know are things no 1950s housewife should. She can fight, scale fences, pick locks, and wield weapons. Then come the episodes. Her mind is flooded with light and buzzing before she wakes up as Bix, a fighter from a dystopian future sent back to save the world from “the guest”. But is any of it real—or just the delusions of a madwoman, as doctors and her husband insist?

The first half of the book is chilling and exciting. Pace captures the horror of psychiatric care institutions in the mid-20th century where “freedom depends on cooperation.” It reminded me of stories like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Girl, Interrupted. I loved the feminist slant to this book too. Dorothy is aware that her autonomy, both in body and mind, are being handed over to men who see her boldness as a problem to be fixed.

“That’s the protocol’s true purpose, to render difficult patients…more manageable, to the point they no longer question the rules or the rule-giver of the institution-whether that institution is Hanover or their marriage. And with all that compliance comes a drive to confess all, then ask for forgiveness.”

The second half of the book shifts as Dorothy’s amnesia lifts. Other characters begin catching Dorothy up as to who she really is and all she missed. Long monologues fill the pages of the story. Dorothy becomes less of a driver of the plot and her dialogue shifts to mostly clarification: “So that’s why I did x, y, or z…?”. While this ties up loose ends, it slows the momentum built in the first half. The cliffhanger ending also left me wishing for resolution after such careful buildup.

Still, Dorothy is a great heroine, the mood is atmospheric, and the genre fusion is unlike anything I’ve read. Despite its uneven pacing, this is an engaging, thought-provoking novel.

A Fusion of Sci-Fi and Psychological Thriller
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