Keeping Eye Contact (Eye Contact - Cammie McGovern)

Member Name: Fiver29

Product:	Eye Contact - Cammie McGovern
Date:	21/08/09 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting read

Disadvantages: Jumps about a bit

Synopsis

The book starts with Kevin, once a happy go lucky boy, but after an accident he was left with some brain damage, which meant he walked with a walker, and often drooled from the side of his mouth. Cara and Suzette were his friends before the accident, and Cara is determined to help him through school, but the school think Kevin would prefer a boy to help him, so he's not embarrassed about using the bathroom, etc. So Cara and Kevin eventually drift apart.

30 years later Cara is back at the school, her son Adam is missing. He suffers from autism and is supposed to be watched during recess, but together with another girl from the special education classes, he's disappeared.

After what seems to be a lifetime to Cara, Adam is eventually found safe and well. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Amelia, who is found in the same area, dead from multiple stab wounds. Adam regresses into himself and cannot or will not speak when the police and psychologists try to ask him what happened. It's up to Cara to try and bring her son out of himself and find out who murdered Amelia.

At the same time, a young boy called Morgan has decided to take it upon himself to solve the crime, he thinks the easiest way to do this will be to befriend Adam and find out from him.

My Thoughts

This is an interesting book to read for a couple of reasons, firstly it gives a completely different insight into autism than the likes of Rainman, and other films that Autistic Savants. Adam doesn't have any special ability like mathematical genius or photographic memory; he has more sensitive hearing than most children, and has a great love of music, particularly opera. Apart from these two things and his learning difficulties/communication difficulties, Adam is no different to the other children in the special needs class. Because of this I think it portrays autism in a more realistic light, and shows the difficulties that parents of autistic children go through.

Setting aside the autism part though, I thought the book was rather bitty. It jumped from one place to the next and from one time period to the next, and didn't flow smoothly. One minute we were with Adam and the police, the next we'd gone back 20 years to Cara, Kevin and Suzette, then jumped forward to some of the other minor characters in the book.

And to be quite honest the background story about Cara, Suzette and Kevin didn't need to be told, because it added nothing to the main storyline. It only served to lessen the amount of sympathy for Cara, because of the things she did as a young adult.

Morgan is probably the most interesting character in the book; he has a lot of problems in his own life, but is determined to solve the mystery of who murdered Amelia. And whilst his methods are clumsy, he certainly seems to do a better job than the police. I won't say too much because it'd spoil the story.

Of course Adam invokes the most sympathy of all the characters because occasionally the author slips into his mind and tells us what he's thinking. Now I'm not sure if an autistic child, or any child for that matter, would think in such a way, but it certainly seemed to fit in with everything else we knew about Adam.

Apart from the story jumping around a bit, it's quite easy reading, unlike some books which take an awful lot of concentration, I found this book was easy to read even in high volume areas like the swimming baths.

Summary: .