But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters.

The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Her increasing bravery parallels new understanding of her siblings and friends, and here the disability-as-metaphor trope actually works-“Going blind is a little bit like growing up.”Ī vivid, sensory tour of the shifting landscapes of blindness and teen relationships. Flashbacks to her year at Briarly flesh out her frustration and fear of embracing a blind identity while raising hopes of an active life as a blind person. Emma’s poetic, sensory narration heightens the typical teen angst of sex, cliques and growing apart. As much to explore her fears after blindness as to talk about Claire’s death, she leads a group of somewhat two-dimensional classmates in philosophical discussions but feels-literally and figuratively-her best friend growing distant. She’s spent a year she’d rather forget at the Briarly School for the Blind trying not to be a “poor blind kid” and finds the world has changed again upon return to her insular hometown: Claire Montgomery, a former classmate, is found drowned in an apparent suicide. Her rehabilitation is meticulously described, from learning to decipher braille to containing her panic. With traces of John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005), DeWoskin’s first teen novel explores death and darkness.īlinded in a fireworks accident, Emma Silver has finally learned to find “shorelines” with her white cane and identify her six wildly different siblings by their breathing.

Blind by Rachel DeWoskin