Synopses & Reviews
A dazzlingly rich and funny novel by "a real China doll" (
Entertainment Weekly)
Rachel DeWoskin is a writer who has been lauded for her "razor-sharp descriptions" (The Wall Street Journal), her "considerable cultural and linguistic resources" (The New Yorker), and her rare ability to offer a "real insider's look at life in modern China" (The Economist). Now DeWoskin, author of the laughout-loud funny and poignant Foreign Babes in Beijing, returns with a new novel about modern China and one American girl's struggle to find herself there.
Aysha is a twenty-two-year-old New Yorker putting the pieces of her life back in place after her parents' divorce and her own nervous breakdown when a young Chinese student named Da Ge flips her world upside-down. In a love story that spans decades and continents, from the Tiananmen Square incident to 9/11, New York City's Upper West Side to the terraced mountains of South China, Repeat After Me gives readers an alternately funny and painful glimpse of life and loss in between languages.
Review
Praise for Blind:
"A profound YA debut" —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"With traces of John Greens Looking for Alaska. . . a vivid, sensory tour of the shifting landscapes of blindness and teen relationships" —Kirkus, starred review
"A gracefully written, memorable, and enlightening novel." —Booklist
"A well-researched and much-needed story. Emma is a capable heroine who manages her disability with realism and grace." —School Library Journal
"The vivid text and the colorful descriptions allow the reader to imagine how and what a blind person sees. . . DeWoskin tells her tale with humor, hope, and powerful reality." —LMC
"Blind. . . allow[s] readers to inhabit another persons soul so fully that they will be unable to separate the heroines pain from their own and become a little less blind to human suffering. . . for sheer emotional profundity and the elusive feeling of living another person's experience through fiction, DeWoskin is hard to beat." —SF Weekly
"Heart-wrenching" —TeenReads.com
“Blind is soon to be on the tips of everyones tongues.” —Bustle.com, August 2014's Best YA Books
More praise for Rachel DeWoskin:
“Wonderfully engaging . . . captures the way adolescence renders ones own identity somehow unknowable” —The Boston Globe on Big Girl Small
“Amusing, hypnotic . . . Like a contemporary version of The Wizard of Oz or its coming-of-age antecedent, Alice in Wonderland, Judys experiences of adolescence are exhilarating, terrifying, and almost uniformly surreal. —Time Out (New York) on Big Girl Small
“Cultures dont so much collide as coalesce in DeWoskins sparkling debut novel . . . Infusing her multicultural narrative with vibrant observations that glitter with laser-intense acuity, DeWoskin demonstrates a smart, sophisticated literary agility.” —Booklist, starred review, on Repeat After Me
“A tender story of manic love and loss, this is a heartbreaking and uplifting novel with memorably off-kilter leads.” —Publishers Weekly on Repeat After Me
“An intelligent and complex portrait . . . DeWoskin deserves special praise.” —The Wall Street Journal on Foreign Babes in Beijing
Synopsis
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 shes 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 whyin order to see for herself what makes life worth living.
Unflinching in its portrayal of Emmas darkest days, yet full of hope and humor, Rachel DeWoskins brilliant Blind is one of those rare books that utterly absorbs the reader into the life and experience of another.
About the Author
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 Silvers story so I could try to feel my way through someone elses 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 atand seethe world.