Wake: By Robert J. Sawyer

I didn't think I would enjoy a book about a blind 16 year old girl, considering how much I loathed reading about the teenage girl in Zoe's Tale (Book 4 of the awesome trilogy by John Scalzi.. yeah I said trilogy.    ) but this book was pretty cool.  I read it in just over a weekend.

Caitlin is the main character, blind since birth, and a bit of a math geek.  She moves to Waterloo with her parents when her Dad gets a job at the Perimeter Institute.  A japanese scientist though claims to have devised a way to give her back her sight, and wants to try it out.  The bulk of the novel is about the success or failure of the attempt.  I can't really elaborate, since it'd spoil some of the surprises.

There are two other story lines in this book.  A new strain of the bird flu erupts into an epidemic in China, and an ape research facility in California struggles to keep their chimp named Hobo from being snatched up by a zoo.  Three very different plots!  The nice thing is they don't really interfere with each other.  I'm sure you've read books where you moan when a story you're interested in gets subverted by another plot line that you don't care about.  I found myself equally interested in each of the plot lines here, and very curious as to how they'd fit together!

There were only two downsides I could think of with this book.  One, some of the exposition gets pretty technical.  I don't know if that level of detail was required to imply the plausibility of events, but I guess the author did.    It's not overbearing, but I wonder if someone less geeky than me would find it so.  Second, this is apparently book one of a trilogy.  So although the big question of the novel gets resolved, you REALLY want to keep reading to see where it goes from there.  I think the next book (which is available already) is called "Watch".

Probably the most notable aspect of the story is how real all the characters felt.  Without going into long detailed descriptions, Sawyer lets us know just who these people are.  Even Hobo (the chimp) is totally realistic, and he can't even talk.  Just sign language.

It's great writing, and a great story.  I recommend you read it.

Just wanted to add, I picked up the third book, Wonder, this week at Sawyer's book launch for Triggers (which also sounded cool), and finished it in about a day.  It's got that "can't put it down" quality.  So two thumbs up for Wonder, and for the WWW trilogy as a whole.  (Clever naming.  The series is about the World Wide Web, but is also an acronym for the book titles, Wake, Watch, and Wonder.)

Here's me at the launch party for Wonder, getting Watch signed.  Yes, I'm always a book behind, cuz I prefer paperback.