Separated by seven decades yet unified by their living space, the real-life psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and the fictional psychotherapist Eliza Kline communicate across time in Frieda’s Song, a historical novel by Ellen Prentiss Campbell about the work of healing.

At the outset, it is 1935. Fromm-Reichmann boards a ship to escape Nazi Germany, leaving behind her mother and two sisters, the former too stubborn to make the passage, the latter bound by the duties of daughterhood. Still wed on paper to a former student, Frieda’s feelings for her spouse have chilled for a number of reasons I won’t spoil here. New hope is born in America, where Frieda accepts a live-work position at Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland. A cottage is custom-built on the grounds for the increasingly newsworthy Frieda, who garners a mix of acclaim and notoriety for her therapeutic approach to schizophrenia.

A time jump to 2009 finds Eliza ensconced in Frieda’s cottage with her teenage son, Nick. Mother and son inhabit the cottage in the shadow of the now-shuttered hospital. The kid is in trouble, which makes his therapist mom feel like a failure for her inability to help. When Eliza unearths Frieda’s journal, she begins her own healing journey under Frieda’s tutelage.

Prentiss Campbell, a trained psychotherapist, is also a deft ventriloquist. She breathes distinct life into each of the three characters’ points of view, gracing Frieda with a formality and severity that feel true to a woman who escaped genocide and became a pioneer in her field at a time when women psychiatrists were scarce. The distinctively different rhythm and tone to the past are a testament to Prentiss Campbell’s sharp ear and intelligent research. The author skillfully crafts a book within a book, applying an entirely different style to Frieda’s journal than that of the novel that frames it.

When the point of view moves from Frieda to Eliza, there are some similarities of voice and preoccupation as a result of the women’s shared profession, but there’s a solid enough difference to distinguish each of them as fully fleshed-out characters. But the shift to Nick’s point of view showcases Prentiss Campbell’s vocal dexterity. It feels strikingly true from the moment we meet him that Nick is a troubled teenage boy who couldn’t come from anywhere except the book’s present-day suburban America. He’s pissed off about the “freak-a-zoid shrink museum” his mother moved them into and he lugs around an exhausting defensiveness meant to disguise what the reader experiences as the deep-seated pain of alienation—he sabotages his chances at getting into IB classes and pretends not to care because the kids in the program are “socio-economic snobs.” Habituated in harmful behaviors that he hides, Nick feels like a specific teenager rather than a stock one, a real and detailed young guy who’s spring-loaded and unpredictable, but also gentle in the manner of an injured cub. The novel’s tension resides in him, and Prentiss Campbell supplies a satisfying measure of dramatic irony: she releases enough information to suggest a number of frightening outcomes but eschews predictability.

The subject of motherhood is threaded throughout, as the novel touches on single motherhood, infertility, therapist as mother proxy, and the lifelong need for a maternal connection. In real life, Fromm-Reichmann was interested in the link between schizophrenia and fraught mother-child relationships, but Prentiss Campbell never makes the mistake of drawing conclusions on that linkage herself. Instead, she raises interesting questions for readers to ponder. When Frieda observes, “We never lose the primitive longing to be held as our mothers held us,” it feels less like a statement of universal fact than like a brand of longing specific to the three main characters, each of whom longs to break free from loneliness. The subject of loneliness is further explored through Frieda’s unfinished paper on the topic, as she fears it is a force undermining her life’s work: “A psychiatrist who is lonely must see that his own need for physical comfort does not interfere with his coming to the correct conclusions about the patient’s needs.”

If loneliness and broken mother-child connections are the stuff of the novel’s dark corners, art and literature are its light spaces. Frieda’s piano remains in the cottage long after she’s gone, and Eliza plays to relax. Nick, for all his brooding teenage tendencies, releases his woes by playing, of all things, a theremin, a fresh choice of instrument to assign a troubled teenager. By writing her mind, Fromm-Reichmann releases her demons, and by reading her diary, Eliza evolves beyond her comfort zone.

In January of this year, the real-life Chestnut Lodge was designated a historic landmark to honor Fromm-Reichmann’s life and work. The May release of Frieda’s Song will continue the commemoration of a life spent healing the self and helping the other while the fictional lives built around Fromm-Reichmann in the book bring fresh perspective to the story of this real-life pioneering woman.

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Ellen Prentiss Campbell is the author of the novel The Bowl with Gold Seams (2016, winner of the Indie Excellence Award for Historical Fiction) and the short story collections Known By Heart (2020) and Contents Under Pressure (2016, nominated for the National Book Award). Her short fiction has been featured in numerous journals including The Massachusetts Review and The MacGuffin. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her essays and reviews appear in The Fiction Writers Review, where she is a contributing editor, the Washington Independent Review of Books, The New York Journal of Books, and others.

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Amy Lyons writes fiction and non-fiction. Her book reviews, theatre reviews, and essays have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Washington City Paper, Backstage, LA Weekly, and The Independent. Her fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, No Contact and others. She won an honorable mention from Miami Book Fair’s 2021 Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction, a 2020 Best of the Net nomination, a 2020 Best Small Fictions nomination, and a 2019 residency at Millay Colony for the Arts. She’s former VP of the LA Drama Critics Circle and holds an MFA from Bennington.