Sight

Winter is coming and the first snowflakes are falling in the small rural American community where the action of this highly atmospheric novel occurs. Some 11 years after the kidnapping and killing of a small child called Clarence memories of the event still linger and are brought into particularly sharp focus with fears that the perpetrator of the crime and of similar more recent ones is once more on the loose. The various members of a close group of school friends, all young teenagers, have their various ways of expressing, and reacting to, these fears, especially 16-year-old Dylan, whose psychic powers endow her with the ‘sight’ of the book’s title. As she herself expresses it in the closing paragraphs, ‘I can see dead kids… I can see kids that have been taken. Sometimes they’re alive, but most of the times they’re dead.’ It is with the arrival of Cate, a newcomer to the area, who shows what seems to be an unnaturally deep interest in the circumstances of Clarence’s death that Dylan and her friends find themselves caught up in a series of events which is to lead to some shocking revelations about their community, its lies and its secrets. Vrettos catches very perceptively the banter and idiom (in all its frankness) of the contemporary American high school, the nuances of certain kinds of parenting and the consequences of social change. She also succeeds, in a novel in which storytelling itself has considerable significance, in telling a memorably gripping, and occasionally quite frightening, story.