Book Review: She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

This was a great find for me because probably about ten years ago I became obsessed with coincidence after reading a bunch of books about coincidence by coincidence.

Those books were:

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman
The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

So this was a A LOT of fun for me for that reason, but I also loved the puzzles, the quirky details, the history lessons and the sheer absurdity of the plotline.

Laureth (named after a shampoo ingredient) answers her father's fan mail (he's an author!) and get a message from someone who has found one of his writing notebooks in New York. But her father is not supposed to be in New York so Laureth worries something is wrong. She worries so much in fact that she kidnaps her younger brother and takes a flight from England to NYC to search for him. 

Laureth is blind, so she needs her brother to help her find her way. Sedgwick does an amazing job of putting us in Laureth's shoes, imagining what it might be like to be visually impaired. Even though Laureth is reckless, she wins points for her endearing relationship with her brother and her drive to never give up.

In addition to the mini-lectures on coincidence, Sedgwick also explores how first impressions can be deceiving to great effect. 

SHE IS NOT INVISIBLE is available now in the UK and comes out in the US next Tuesday. Find out more about it at the author's website.

FTC disclosure: Review copy from the publisher via Netgalley