#BookReview: Blind by @racheldewoskin with @adivineeternity

About the Book: When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she's about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why - in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.

Unflinching in its portrayal of Emma's darkest days, yet full of hope and humor, Rachel DeWoskin's brilliant Blind is one of those rare books that utterly absorbs the listener into the life and experience of another.

Reviewed By: Caity G.

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Recommended Age: Teens

Genre: YA, Contemporary Fiction

How I Acquired this book: Bought it

Overall rating: ★★★★
Goodreads | Amazon

About the Author: Rachel DeWoskin is the author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about her inadvertent notoriety as the star of a Chinese soap opera, and a novel, Repeat After Me. She lives in New York City and Beijing and is at work on her fourth book, Statutory.

Noteworthy experiences while reading this book: It was honestly slow to start and difficult to get into, but in the end I really appreciated what the author was aiming to do by having a very typical teenager who just happened to be blind and attempting to explain how she perceived the world

Check out author's other books? I won't run out the door for them, but if it looks interesting than sure
Recommend this book? Sure

Notes and Opinions: I did not love the protagonist, honestly, but I appreciated what she went through. Sometimes the descriptions of what it was like to be blind in a seeing world worked out well and sometimes they didn't. I really found it interesting how she perceived words and voices as not just tones but colors, too, which I suppose is an advantage a blind person who used to be able to see might have, not that there's any real advantage to being blinded.

What I liked the most about the story, though, was the ending. I was glad it ended when and how it did, as she showed a good bit of character growth throughout, once I got about 120 or so pages in and the story finally got moving. By the end, she had recognized what good she could still do as well as the incredible amount of said good. Realizing you are still a person with so much to offer and that being blind is just a difficulty to learn about and manage and then live with in the best way you can is an important lesson for anybody facing trying circumstances.

That's what I found beautiful in this book and the reason I rated it as high as I did, despite its painfully slow start. I also love that the author actually learned how to read braille as a seeing person just so she could more fully understand what the protagonist was learning.

Go Into This One Knowing: The protagonist can be a bit whiny and it gets a little repetitive at times, but overall it's worth a try because you can really appreciate what she experiences after being blinded

 

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Posted in: 4 Stars, Penguin, Review, Young Adult