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BookBrowse Reviews Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

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Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

Eye Contact

by Cammie McGovern
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  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 2006, 304 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2007, 320 pages
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Once in a blue moon comes a literary thriller so full of our everyday lives that it rocks you back on your heels. This is it!

Not wishing to beat about the bush on this, let me tell you up front that I just loved this book!  When selecting titles to recommend I look for books that will both entertain and inform (because life is too short to spend it reading lightweight fluff, but equally who wants to spend their hard-earned leisure time reading dull, weighty tomes?), in particular I look for books that give me the opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes - for example, books that take me to a place that I don't know or put me inside the brain of somebody quite different to myself.  McGovern has done the latter quite brilliantly - I really felt that I was seeing the world through the eyes of her lead protagonists.

Eye Contact
has a wide cast of characters (one reviewer felt a few too many) but they are all well-drawn and, on the whole, ring true.  The most richly imagined are Cara, Adam's mother, and Morgan, a troubled 13-year-old boy who's determined to solve the crime as a way to atone for his own perceived guilt.  McGovern wraps all these richly drawn characters and a host of astute insights around a gripping mystery which twists and turns down a good few dead ends before arriving at its unexpected conclusion - making the whole package irresistible.

Selected Reviews
"Meticulously researched and emotionally absorbing, this provocative page-turner also addresses an important issue—how to educate and care for children with special needs." - PW.
"Tightly woven and gripping, this literary mystery takes several unexpected twists and turns as it builds to the resolution." - Booklist.
"Their narrow suburban world is populated by an excessive number of damaged souls laboring to rebuild their lives; it all reads too much as case study. Nevertheless, the narrative moves like a freight train, and its conclusion will leave no reader unmoved." - Kirkus.

This review first ran in the August 2, 2006 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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