Synopses & Reviews
Read Cammie McGovern's posts on the Penguin Blog Like The Lovely Bones and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Cammie McGovern’s breakout novel is at once a hypnotic thriller and an affecting portrait of people as real as our next-door neighbors. In Eye Contact, two children vanish in the woods behind their elementary school. Hours later, nine-year-old Adam is found alive, the sole witness to his playmate’s murder. But because Adam has autism, he is a silent witness. Only his mother, Cara, can help decode his behavior for the police. As the suspense ratchets, Eye Contact becomes a heart-stopping exploration of the bond between a mother and a very special child.
Review
Deeply moving, actually gripping . . . Cammie McGovern . . . brings to the page an empathetic understanding of the lock that autism places on a mother's child. (New York Daily News)
Review
An enticing drama. (Entertainment Weekly)
Review
Eye Contact is a page-turner. . . . But it's also . . . a nuanced, poignant exploration of how all of uswith or without autismstruggle to find our place in the world. (Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep)
Review
So detailed and illuminating are McGovern's descriptions of Adam . . . that she offers, in essence, a primer on the nature of autism. Eye Contact is compelling by virtue of its spiky and in-transition characters. Psychologically rich and sensationally eventful. (Chicago Tribune)
Review
An airtight thriller that illuminates the exhausting, isolating realities of parenting special- needs children. (
People)
An enticing drama. (Entertainment Weekly)
Deeply moving, actually gripping . . . Cammie McGovern . . . brings to the page an empathetic understanding of the lock that autism places on a motherÆs child. (New York Daily News)
Eye Contact is a page-turner. . . . But itÆs also . . . a nuanced, poignant exploration of how all of usùwith or without autismùstruggle to find our place in the world. (Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep)
So detailed and illuminating are McGovernÆs descriptions of Adam . . . that she offers, in essence, a primer on the nature of autism. Eye Contact is compelling by virtue of its spiky and in-transition characters. Psychologically rich and sensationally eventful. (Chicago Tribune)
Synopsis
Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy, is discovered hiding near the body of his classmate. They had wandered away from the school playground hours earlier, and now Adam is the only witness to an appalling crime. But he can't tell the police what he saw or heard. Barely verbal on the best of days, Adam has retreated into the silent world that Cara, his mother, knows well. With her community in shock and her son unable to help with the investigation, Cara tries to decode the puzzling events. Adam has never broken the rules before, so why did he disappear with the little girl? Cara, a single mother, has devoted her life to opening paths of communication between her son and the outside world. Now, she must interpret the changes in Adam's behavior to help him through the trauma, and to catch a killer.
Synopsis
Like The Lovely Bones and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Cammie McGovern's breakout novel is at once a hypnotic thriller and an affecting portrait of people as real as our next-door neighbors. In Eye Contact, two children vanish in the woods behind their elementary school. Hours later, nine-year-old Adam is found alive, the sole witness to his playmate's murder. But because Adam has autism, he is a silent witness. Only his mother, Cara, can help decode his behavior for the police. As the suspense ratchets, Eye Contact becomes a heart-stopping exploration of the bond between a mother and a very special child.
About the Author
Cammie McGovern was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and received the Nelson Algren Award in short fiction. Her work has been published in Redbook, Seventeen, Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, and other publications. This is her second novel.