Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Children’s, Teenage & Educational
Weblink
www.racheldewoskin.com

BLIND

Rachel DeWoskin

When your life as you know it is taken from you, how do you go on?

When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she’s about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why—in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.

Unflinching in its portrayal of Emma’s darkest days, yet full of hope and humor, Rachel DeWoskin’s brilliant Blind is one of those rare books that utterly absorbs the reader into the life and experience of another.

Rachel spent her twenties in China as a consultant, writer, and the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera called "Foreign Babes in Beijing." Her memoir of those years, Foreign Babes in Beijing, has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. Her novel Repeat After Me, about a young American ESL teacher, a troubled Chinese radical, and their unexpected New York romance, won a Foreward Magazine Book of the Year award. Her third book, the novel Big Girl Small, was published by FSG in 2011. Rachel has a BA in English from Columbia and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Rachel divides her time between NYC, Chicago, and Beijing with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two little girls.

Available products
Book Published 2014-08-07 by Viking Children's Books
Book Published 2014-08-07 by Viking Children's Books

Comments

I began to imagine and write Blind when my two little girls fell in love with The Black Book of Colors, a shiny, embossed wonder of a book full of images you can feel rather than see. The more I read it with them, the more I wondered what it would be like to be a young person who could see and then lost that ability. What would books feel like to my daughters or me if we read them with our fingers and voices? What would we look like to each other? I closed my eyes and tried. If I could not open my eyes again, would my memories stay visual? How would the world sound and feel and look? Would my senses cross so that I could taste, smell and hear colors? What would language look and feel like, and how would I read, think and make meaning of the world? I wrote Emma Sasha Silver’s story so I could try to feel my way through someone else’s experience, always one of my favorite parts of both writing and reading. I learned Braille, closed my eyes and opened my imagination to the fantastic possibility of an utterly new way to look at—and see—the world.

While writing the book, DeWoskin learned Braille at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, and her sensitivity to details (comparing characters’ voices to smells, textures, and colors; describing conflicted reactions to Emma’s blindness) shows. By using Claire’s death as a counterpoint to Emma’s misfortune—one chosen, the other inflicted—DeWoskin enables her characters and readers to put tragedy into perspective.

A well-researched and much-needed story. Emma is a capable heroine who manages her disability with realism and grace.

With traces of John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005), DeWoskin’s first teen novel explores death and darkness.

A gracefully written, memorable, and enlightening novel.