Blind
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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 reader into the life and experience of another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Emma, the protagonist in adult writer DeWoskin's profound YA debut, knows, "we're all only a half-second disaster, mistake, or choice away from being changed forever." At the start of Emma's freshman year, she loses her sight in a freak accident. Despite help and support from her parents, six siblings, best friend Logan, and classmates at Briarly a school for the blind Emma attends before she "mainstreams" back to her local high school Emma wants to curl up and die. But when Claire, a friend from her "old life," kills herself by swallowing a cocktail of painkillers and drowning, Emma rethinks her "PBK" (poor blind kid) attitude and her approach to recovery. While writing the book, DeWoskin learned Braille at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, and her sensitivity to details (comparing characters' voices to smells, textures, and colors; describing conflicted reactions to Emma's blindness) shows. By using Claire's death as a counterpoint to Emma's misfortune one chosen, the other inflicted DeWoskin enables her characters and readers to put tragedy into perspective. Ages 12 up.
