Book Review: Farsighted by Emlyn Chand

Farsighted by Emlyn Chand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I won a free copy of this book through the GoodReads First-Reads program.

Alex Kosmitoras was born blind. While he manages to get along in a sighted world, he sometimes resents his lack of independence. But when he begins hearing things that have not yet happened or are not happening in his immediate vicinity, he worries that he might be going insane--until he learns that he is not the only one in his circle of friends with gifts.

Alex is a well-written teenage boy, which I could tell by the number of times I wanted to smack him upside the head for some stupid, impulsive thing he'd done. Chand also does a remarkable job at describing the world around Alex with incredibly few visual cues, though there are places where things are described without any indication of how Alex knows what's happening (I am more than willing to excuse these considering the difficult task that Chand has taken on in writing a first-person blind character). I also think it's great that Chand chose to make Alex's "visions" just as sensory and auditory as everything else in his life rather than giving him some magical sense of sight.

There were points at which I felt things were coming together a bit too easily for Alex's development--unless he himself was causing major problems in his interpersonal relationships--and there were a few choices on the parts of other characters I found inexplicable, but overall this was a good book and I enjoyed reading it.

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