Some romances are filled with historical references while others, like “Hello Stranger,” are filled with touching tales of mixed signals and star-crossed communication. But what I really love about Katherine Center’s newest book is the way that by the time we finish the first page, we’re hooked. Sadie, the main character, has already shared that she doesn’t have a close relationship with her father, that she’s won a place as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society’s yearly contest, and that she struggles financially. The first person narrative is quite engaging, and we like Sadie from the start.
What we quickly find out as Sadie explains her life to date is that Sadie lost her mother when she was fourteen and that she and her father have been at odds since then. He was disappointed when she dropped out of premed to study art, partly because he was a doctor and wanted her to be financially secure. But the other reason may have been that her mother, who died tragically, was an artist.
Her best friend Sue—whose parents allow Sadie to live in a “hovel” on the roof of their apartment building for a rent that she can afford, while all the parties pretend that she’s not really living there, just using it as an artist studio—decides to throw Sadie a party to celebrate her making it to the finalist stage of the competition. On the way back from the convenience store after buying some cheap wine, Sadie loses consciousness in the middle of the street. She wakes up in the hospital, and finds out that she needs brain surgery because of a neurovascular lesion in her brain.
Sadie wants to wait to have the surgery because she only has six weeks to paint her final entry into the contest, and she’s determined that it be an incredible portrait of Sue. But her father pressures her to have the surgery sooner, telling her that her mother died after putting off the exact same surgery. He had her scheduled for the surgery, and after finding out how deadly it could be, Sadie agrees.
But when Sadie wakes up after the surgery, there are complications. She has a swelling in the part of her brain that controls how we recognize faces. She learns she has acquired apperceptive prosopagnosia, and for someone who paints portraits and needs to paint perhaps the most important portrait of her life in the next few weeks, this is a tragedy.
The novel is about how Sadie, with the help of Sue, navigates life going forward. Sadie also happens to run into a very helpful guy in her building who wants to support her. She is really used to not accepting help at all at any time. Independence is very important to her. But when Sue is “kidnapped” by her fiancé so they can elope during a two-week train trip, Sadie is forced to ask for help. She asks the kind, helpful guy in the building to sit for the portrait. Her reluctance to ask him is partially based on a conversation she overhears in the elevator, a terrible phone call, in which she heard him refer to an unspecified female as a “mountain of blubber” and who was in his apartment for a “two-night stand.”
The crossed signals from Sadie’s prosopagnosia cause some—in retrospect—hilarious misunderstandings. But along the way, we learn a lot about not only the cognitive disorder commonly referred to as “face blindness”; we also learn about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when we strongly believe something, so we seek out information that confirms our preexisting beliefs and ignore information that contradicts those beliefs.
Sadie’s confirmation bias causes some truly comic moments in the story, but it also should make readers step back to consider what confirmation biases we have. I really like it when a novel offers more than just a good story — a thoughtful idea or information that is new to me. In “Hello Stranger,” Katherine Center has done both. She’s shared information about face blindness, and while I’ve heard about confirmation bias in a very general way, I now feel that I have a deeper level of understanding.
In conclusion, this is a story that will keep you reading because you really like the main character, and because you really want to know what will happen to Sadie because you’ve grown to care about her. (Personally, her devotion to her dog, Peanut, means she could ask me for anything and I’d do it.) But the plot is darling, the twists extremely cute, and the ending perfect. I hope the fictional Peanut lives to be 20, and I hope my own foster dog Peanut, a 17-pound small senior dog does the same. I highly recommend this modern, rom-com romance.
Please note: This review is based on the advance reader’s copy provided by St.Martin’s Press, the publisher, for review purposes.