Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern

The Story: In a small patch of woods outside of an elementary school, a young girl is murdered.  The only witness to the murder is Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy.  Even on a good day, he is almost completely non-verbal, but after this, he totally shuts down.

His mom, Cara, has always been drawn to people who are broken or need fixed.  She has worked endlessly with Adam and can read his non-verbal clues like a book.  She has his mannerisms and routine down to a science.  Using this knowledge, she starts investigating why Adam (a rule follower to the max) would have been in the woods, and what could have caused the responses that he had.  This investigation takes her back to her past to her relationship with Adam’s father and her best friend at the time.  This untying of the past actually becomes pretty important as the book goes on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here: police officers with other motives, a middle-school boy who casts himself as a junior detective, over-bearing parents, and a lot of issues about dealing with special needs within the education system.

This book starts off strong, builds up the pressure, then offers twists everywhere until you can’t see which way is up.  I’m not going to ruin this for you, but the ending is wiiiild.

What I Thought: A lot of times, after I read a book, I’ll go to goodreads.com and read a few reviews just to see what other people think.  One of the reviewers said that this book seemed like a cross between I Promise Not to Tell and The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. I think that is an incredibly fair assessment.  If you end up reading this and liking it, pick up these other two.  Peas in a pod.

I thought that the first part of this book was totally intriguing.  The mystery was part of that, of course, but really the family at the center was the biggest intrigue.  Would Adam come out of his box to tell who did this, would Cara be able to figure it out or get Adam to talk?  How would the police and the school administration treat this gentle kid involved in a really horrid killing?  All these questions are what kept me reading late into the night one night.

I have to admit to a little bit of disappointment in where this ended up going.  I felt like there were way to many characters introduced to be supported by a little 250 page book.  The ex-boyfriend, his crazy mom, the ex-best friend, her brother,  the middle school boy, his mom, his friends, the special ed teacher, the middle school bullies…. I could go on and on and on.  These characters all had interesting stories, but it was all just a little too much.  The author didn’t give me time to truly get involved in these characters so they just seemed kind of trivial.

To be fair, the twists at the end were pretty much crazy and at several different times I thought I had it figured out, only to be totally blown away with just how wrong I’d been.  I like a mystery that does that.  So, there ya go.

Conclusion: If you like a quick little mystery between heavier books, try this one out.  Probably a book that I’ll forget about in the next couple of months, but it was a good distraction for a couple of days. Like I said earlier, I think if you liked Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, that you will probably get into this one too.  It’s worth a shot.