Strange Houses

by Cora Jarrett

It tells of a psychological experiment gone wrong, swapping the identities of a millionaire’s middle-aged wife and a young stripper between their bodies, the ‘strange houses’ of the title.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1937

Reviews

[Maria]

I impulsively picked up this 1930s novel up from my university library with no prior knowledge about the story or the author. It turned out to be a psychological thriller of sorts, and overall I liked it. The plot is intriguing: a medical experiment results in the consciousness of one woman inhabiting the body of another, and vice versa. The book takes 50-60 pages to establish the main plot thread and drags on a bit as the characters try to understand the strange situation. Still, the central questions of the story were compelling enough to keep me reading, and there were a couple of twists at the end that surprised me. Jarrett's imagery is striking in some passages, and I liked how she develops the character of the narrator, a middle-aged woman who isn't a main actor in the plot but learns about events from her friends. I didn't particularly care about the romantic conflicts of the other characters, but I was really interested in how the narrator describes herself as a "nonconductor" who doesn't fall in love with men.