In Her Defense by Phillipa Malicka

I am torn about this one. It raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of therapy combined with a hint about the training and regulation of therapists, but it ultimately did not answer the important ones, in my mind at least. The book opens with a court battle between a celebrity and an untrained therapist, but there are underlying mysteries that involve two other women. In London, the center of the trial is a woman named Mary. On one side is Mary’s mother, Anna Finbow, a beloved TV star but also not mother-of-the-year material, and Mary’s charismatic, controlling therapist, Jean Guest, whose unorthodox methods appear to be predatory and cultish. Neither are reliable witnesses, but least reliable of all is the book’s narrator, Augusta Bird, Anna’s former dog walker. She was coming off a bad breakup when she first found employment with Anna, but her loneliness and depression don’t explain some shifty behaviors. The timing was odd as well; the trial was approaching and Anna hadn’t seen Mary in years. Gus, poor and with no family support, is sympathetic and suspicious at the same time. And what does Mary have to do with it? Eventually, chapters go back in time to show these characters’ complex lives and the depths they suffer. But these portraits are keenly observed—and show why they are vulnerable to predation. As the book goes on, more and more questions arise about victimhood, power, perspective. Many are unanswered, and at no point is the issue of the power that therapists can wield and why training and regultion is so important, so as a mental health professional, I was ultimately dissatisfied with the outcome.