Blind Spot (review)

Roz's congenital macular degeneration has never posed a problem until Mr. Dellian, the Special Education teacher, decides to enroll all students with IEPs in a Life Skills class. His intentions may be good, but his methods are clumsy, as he counters Roz's stubborn resistance with more of his own, insisting that she speak up for herself and then punishing her when she does. He partners her with a wild girl in the class named Tricia, whose emotional instability is likely related to a drug addiction. When Tricia goes missing and later turns up dead, Roz tries to piece together the story of Tricia's life and death, and she finds mysterious gaps in her own experience that all seem related to her new boyfriend, Jonathan. Savvy readers will immediately suspect that a party drug is involved, but Roz herself conveniently doesn't make the connection until it's too late for Tricia. While the books give full props to people functioning well with their disabilities, each character has a dominant trait, and that trait is consistently overblown, rendering the characters more caricatured than nuanced and well drawn. Mr. Dellian, for instance, is too domineering and controlling, crossing the lines of believability in his responses to Roz. Heather, her new best friend, is overly pushy and chipper, and Greg, the longsuffering boy who is willing to wait for Roz to get over the two-timing, potentially dangerous Jonathan, is one of those perfect high school guys—desperately good-looking, smart, generous, mature, unfailingly patient and supportive—that only exist, alas, between the covers of a book. The mystery plot works well, though, with sinister characters implicated in Tricia's complicated problems, and Tricia herself proving an unreliable witness as well as a sympathetic victim. Elements of the problem novel commingled with a potential murder mystery will be a draw for fans of ripped-from-the-headlines drama.