She Is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick (review)

Laureth’s father, a successful fiction writer, has been having a rough patch in his career, ever since he abandoned his “funny” books to research the idea of coincidences. Now he’s gone missing, and so, led by a mysterious emailer who claims to have found Dad’s missing notebook, Laureth swipes her mother’s credit card, packs up her younger brother Benjamin, and sets off across the Atlantic to track Dad down somewhere in New York. The trek is further complicated by that fact that Laureth is blind and Benjamin appears prone to the Pauli Effect, a propensity to wreck electronics just with his touch. Sedgwick takes the somewhat shopworn theme of siblings on a parent hunt to a fascinating new level as Laureth, who has always been skeptical of her father’s belief in meaning behind coincidence, begins to interpret obstacles along their path as evidence he may be right. Dad’s notebook and Laureth’s musings lead readers into a labyrinth of competing philosophies on coincidence, numinous experiences, and apophenia, or the tendency to discern patterns among random phenomena. Just when readers are thoroughly invested in the cerebral aspects of the pursuit, though, Sedgwick spirals back onto a more prosaic plane, with a pair of awkwardly drawn villains, an abrupt reappearance of Dad, marital reconciliation, and the abandonment of the entire philosophical plot line. The core of the mystery, bolstered by the siblings’ respective unusual traits, may be enough to keep many readers happy nonetheless, and even those disappointed by the mundane turn of fictional events will have ingested some potent new vocabulary terms and a heckuva lot to think about.