Blind Sight
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
This spellbinding story introduces the unforgettable seventeen-year-old narrator, Luke Prescott, who has been brought up in a bohemian matriarchy by his divorced New Age mother, a religious grandmother, and two precocious half-sisters. Having spent a short lifetime swinging agreeably between the poles of Eastern mysticism and New England Puritanism, Luke is fascinated by the new fields of brain science and believes in having evidence for his beliefs. “Without evidence,” he declares, “you just have hope, which is nice, but not reliable.” Luke is writing his college applications when his father—a famous television star whom he never knew—calls and invites him to Los Angeles for the summer. Luke accepts and is plunged into a world of location shooting, celebrity interviews, glamorous parties, and premieres. As he begins to know the difference between his father’s public persona and his private one, Luke finds himself sorting through his own personal mythology.
By the end of the summer Luke thinks he has found the answers he’s been seeking, only to discover that the differences between truth and belief are not always easy to spot, and that evidence can be withheld: when Luke returns home, his mother reveals something she knows will change everything for him.
With Blind Sight, Meg Howrey gives us a smart, funny, and deeply moving story about truth versus belief, about what we do and don’t tell ourselves—with the result, as Luke says, that we don’t always know what we know.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former ballet dancer Howrey makes an impressive debut with an intriguing novel that examines personal history. Having just met his famous actor father for the first time, Luke is spending the summer with him in Hollywood while working on his college application essay. The product of a one-night stand and the only male child in several generations of women, Luke was raised to be accepting, sensitive, and adept at reading signals, qualities that help him bond with a man he never knew and take Hollywood insanity in stride. So when his father confides a career-killing secret, revealing it in screenplay form no less, Luke understands the need to keep quiet about it. Back home in Philadelphia, his mother reveals a secret about her past. Alternating between tricky present tense first- and third-person sections, the novel speeds along with deftly drawn characters and pitch-perfect dialogue until a late unnecessary twist, dropped suddenly and left unresolved, lessens the impact of an otherwise assured debut.