THINGS NOT SEEN by Andrew Clements, Philomel Books, March 2002

"I'm looking through you, where did you go

I thought I knew you, what did I know

You don't look different, but you have changed

I'm looking through you, you're not the same..." --Lennon & McCartney

Having evolved from writing some fine picture books to the recent successes of FRINDLE up through this year's THE SCHOOL STORY, Andrew Clements has now written a mature and intense middle-grade novel that utterly held me in its grasp from its first page to the last.  Part science fiction, part coming-of-age story, and part first-love tale, THINGS NOT SEEN is the mesmerizing account of a tenth grade kid from Chicago who awakens one day to find himself invisible.

"It's a Tuesday morning in February, and I get up as usual, and I stumble into the bathroom to take a shower in the dark.  Which is my school-day method because it's sort of like an extra ten minutes of sleep. 

It's after the shower.  That's when it happens.

It's when I turn on the bathroom light and wipe the fog off the mirror to comb my hair.  It's what I see in the mirror.  It's what I don't see. 

I look a second time, and then rub at the mirror again.

I'm not there.

That's what I'm saying.

I'm.  Not.  There."

There is no acknowledgments page in my Advanced Reading Copy; I'm quite curious to know about Clements' research into the physics and the various phenomena that are considered by the story's characters as possible causes for Bobby's sudden condition.  I'm no "science wonk" like Bobby's dad, but within the context of the miracles and breakthroughs of science and medicine that we hear about on a daily basis, this story seems so believable--I was certainly buying (I am still buying) the plausibility of what happens to Bobby Phillips.

Bobby is a kid who was already feeling invisible before this happened.  At the high-octane private school he attends, he is neither one of the "brainy" kids nor one of the "popular" kids.  He denies being a misfit, but recollects saying "Hi" to a girl at school--one of the "Chosen Ones"--and having her look right through him and keep walking.  

Clements is in the midst of exploring Bobby's invisibility-as-a-disability--a truly fascinating concept--when Bobby has a pair of chance meetings with a kindred spirit.  A beautiful girl, who was struck blind two years earlier, is going through her own phase of feeling invisible.  Alicia has survived in large part as a result of the one girlfriend who didn't start looking through her after her accident.  Now, Alicia's blindness lets her see him.

There is such an immediacy, a tactility, a sensuality that results from the author's portrayal of Bobby's state of being.  There are also some great parent-kid issues here...along with some swipes at governmental interference.  (I'm curious how closely Clements' own anti-war involvement follows that of Bobby's mom's.)

Richie Partington

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