The Rules Of Seeing by Joe Heap

          3.5 Stars

Like The Safinova Surprise sandwich this is a bizarre book that takes a while to get in to, actually it takes over a hundred pages before you really start to bed in to the book itself.  It all feels a little disconnected and disjointed in the early stages and doesn't actually start to become cohesive until about half way through, fortunately by that point the characters have started to grow on you so it did keep me reading.  I couldn't shake the feeling that the author had started off writing one story and ended up telling another, from a kitchen sink drama it morphs in to a thriller.  To be honest, the thriller it becomes is well worth a read and completely gripping.

It is basically the story of two women, Jillian "Nova" Safinova and Kate.  They meet after Nova has an operation to give her sight, sight that has been missing since birth, and Kate suffers from a head injury.  Whilst I found Nova's sections warm and rather wonderful pieces of writing that gave a real insight in to her life before and after the operation I never quite got to grip with Kate.  I couldn't understand the sudden paranoia she seemed to suffer from after being hospitalised, nowhere does the book mention that her head injury could be responsible for personality changes so maybe she was always this neurotic and we just couldn't see it.

The blurb talks about a love story and there is a little bit of that here but the relationships never feel quite tangible somehow.  There is always that feeling that rather than romantic love this is all more about companionship and survival than passion.  The author certainly manages to show the fractured nature of relationships with parents, friends, former lovers and new ones and even though these are touched on only briefly for both characters there is a deftness of touch to the writing that lets you see a little deeper in to the characters.

For a first novel this is actually pretty good, I did feel that the editor needed to have a heavier hand and that the whole would have benefitted from a more directed plot.  A decision should have been made about what the story wanting to be told was going to be as the current mash up of genres really does not do the author, or the reader, any justice.  The author clearly has a good idea of what makes people tick and it comes across quite well in the book; I can't help but think this would have worked better as a psychological thriller from the off rather than morphing in to one.

On a final note, I loved the thought given to the nature of sight and it made me realise quite how bizarre this important sense is.  How much we take for granted having been lucky enough to see from birth.  Touching on both loss of sight (with Nova's mentor John) and the giving of sight to Nova herself it genuinely makes you think about just how weird everything is if you just stop and think about it.  To Nova there is no depth to the visual world, people's faces are monstrous and every day items are terrifying in their shape and structure.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK SUPPLIED BY READERS FIRST.