Not If I See You First by Eric Lindstrom

Happy New Years Eve!

I can’t believe I’ve been doing this blog for over a year now. Here’s hoping for another year of book reviews!

High School

Don’t deceive me. Ever. Especially using my blindness. Especially in public.

Don’t help me unless I ask. Otherwise you’re just getting in my way or bothering me.

Don’t be weird. Seriously, other than having my eyes closed all the time, I’m just like you only smarter.

Parker Grant doesn’t need 20/20 vision to see right though you. That’s why she created the Rules: Don’t treat her any differently just because she’s blind, and never take advantage. There will be no second chances. Just ask Scott Kilpatrick, the boy who broke her heart.

When Scott suddenly reappears in her life after being gone for years, Parker know there’s only one way to react – shun him so hard it hurts. She has enough on her mind already, like trying out for the track team (that’s right, her eyes don’t work but her legs still do), doling out tough-love advice to her painfully naïve classmates, and giving herself gold stars for every day she hasn’t cried since her dad’s death 3 months ago. But avoiding her past quickly proves impossible, and the more Parker learns about what really happened – both with Scott, and her dad – the more she starts to question if things are always as they seem. Maybe some Rules are meant to be broken.

After the first few pages, I immediately like this girl. She’s pretty much a badass. She comes off sort of mean but in a world that preys on the weak you have to be able to defend yourself and Parker does that by getting in your face. She reminds me of Max Black from the TV show ‘2 Broke Girls’. If you’re under the age of 14, don’t watch this show yet.

This story is mostly about Parker’s blindness and how she deals with it. This is kind of a bad and good thing. It’s kind of off putting that her being blind is the main focus of the story where as in ‘She Is Not Invisible’, Laureth being blind was more of a side thing and the mystery was the main focus. In Parker’s case she’s been blind since she was 7 and has had time to get a handle on it, unlike Emma in ‘Blind’. Parker has been blind long enough to learn tricks on how to get around on her own.

Another thing I love about Parker is that she’s training to run track. You’re probably thinking that’s dangerous but the worse thing that could happen is she trips and falls. She could be doing something a lot more dangerous like driving a car. A blind person driving a car is actually possible. Check out MythBusters for proof.

If you love Parker’s attitude towards her blindness as much as I do, check out the show ‘Growing Up Fisher’. It’s about an 11-year-old and his lawyer and blind father, Mel. This show was hilarious and unfortunately only had one season.

Blind by Rachel DeWoskin

Happy Christmas Eve everyone!

Hope you all are having a happy holiday!

Middle School & High School

This story stars Emma Sasha Silver, who loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident and now she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. Being one of seven kids, Emma used to be the invisible one, but now it feels like everyone is watching her.

Just as she’s about to start high school and try to recover her former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Emma, now fifteen and blind, has to untangle what happened and why - in order to see what makes life worth living.

I honestly didn’t like this book as much as “She Is Not Invisible”. It’s not because it’s a bad book but when I read the description I thought she would be solving the mystery behind her classmates death. It was just sort of disappointing. It’s more of a self-growing and self-learn journey kind of book.

Unlike Laureth in “She Is Not Invisible”, Emma wasn’t born blind. She could see for the first 15 years of her life and then she just lost it. I don’t blame Emma for being gloomy and harsh in the beginning. I mean, she lost her sight in a freak accident, her whole world turned upside down. That’s hard on anybody.

She Is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

Here is the start of my list on books about blindness followed by a list of books by one of my favorite authors, April Henry.

Please enjoy!

Middle School and High School

Laureth Peak’s father has taught her to look for recurring events, patterns, and numbers – a skill she’s remarkably talented at. When he goes missing while researching coincidence for a new book, Laureth and her younger brother fly from London to New York and must unravel a series of cryptic messages to find him. The complication: Laureth is blind. Relying on her other senses and on her brother to guide her, Laureth finds that rescuing her father will take all her skill at spotting the extraordinary, and sometimes dangerous, connections in a world full of darkness.

The number one thing I like about this book is that it doesn’t go too much into Laureth’s blindness. They only talk about in the first chapter and then it’s on to other things. And when they did talk about it, they didn’t say anything like ‘how hard it is not being able to see’ or ‘how her life was so difficult’. Nope. They talked about how other people treated her for being blind, how they would stop talking to her after they found out. To me, that is the stupidest thing ever. She’s still the same person you were talking to three seconds ago; she just can’t see your stupid face.

The true beauty about Laureth is that she was born blind and wasn’t actually sad about not being able to see. You can’t miss what you never had. And in a small sort of way, it might be an advantage. If you can’t see the person, you can’t judge them by the way they look.

The story’s plot mostly goes into the details of a coincidence, which I found very weird. Laureth’s father was writing a book about the science and junk behind a coincidence and I honestly didn’t understand how someone could write a book on the subject. I mean, if the book was just a collection of odd and unbelievable coincidence stories I might be more interested. Which, ironically, this story kind of is.

Even though I didn’t fully understand the coincidence part of the story, this is still one of the best books I’ve every read.