BookBrowse Reviews Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern

BookBrowse:

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!

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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.