From the cover:
"On his first day at a new school, blind sixteen-year-old Will Porter accidentally groped a girl on the stairs, sat on another student in the cafeteria, and somehow drove a classmate to tears. High school can only go up from here, right?
As Will starts to find his footing, he develops a crush on a sweet but shy girl named Cecily. And despite his fear that having a girlfriend will make him inherently dependent on someone sighted, the two of them grow closer and closer. Then an unprecedented opportunity arises: an experimental surgery that could give Will eyesight for the first time in his life. But learning to see is more difficult than Will ever imagined, and he soon discovers that the sighted world has been keeping secrets. It turns out Cecily doesn’t meet traditional definitions of beauty—in fact, everything he’d heard about her appearance was a lie engineered by their so-called friends to get the two of them together. Does it matter what Cecily looks like? No, not really. But then why does Will feel so betrayed?"
I stumbled across this book by Josh Sundquist when on the hunt for a new audiobook, and I was immediately intrigued. I've never read a book where the main character was blind before, and I was interested to read a story from the perspective of a person without sight living in a sighted world. I wanted to love it. I really did.
I didn't.
There was nothing inherently wrong with the story...Will is nervous starting at a mainstream school after attending a school for the blind for most of his life. His first day, as demonstrated by the summary, gets off to a rocky start. Fortunately, that rocky start leads to his making friends--yay! These friendships develop throughout the story, and as they do, he develops a crush on one of them--awesome! Cecily is nice and intelligent but also shrouded in mystery because people bully her and his friends get super weird when he asks what she looks like. GULP! The drama...the intrigue! What's wrong with Cecily?! (Seriously though...I felt like the "what does Cecily look like?!" storyline vastly overshadowed the "holy shit, I have a chance to get a surgery that has only ever worked on like twenty people" storyline)
Ultimately, my biggest issues with this book were 1. that I found Will insanely unlikeable and 2. that the ending was incredibly sugary sweet. I'll also throw in the minor third issue that in family that is pretty clearly super rich (dad gets home from work early at the beginning of the book, so they just go out and buy a Tesla, for god's sake), Will's mom sold her car for money to fund a road trip. For real?! "My ATM limit wasn't that high." Go inside, fool...you could easily have gotten enough money to pay for gas and hotels without selling your damn car. Not my favorite book ever.
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