Stephen is invisible: he was born that way. He doesn’t know the logistics, just that he can’t see himself, and no one else has ever seen him, either. He knows his invisibility is the result of a curse, but by the time he’s almost sixteen, and his mother (who raised him) is dead, it’s just something he lives with, just how things are. He knows from experience that if he concentrates, he can make himself tangible to others; he knows from experience that his voice, if he speaks, can always be heard. But he doesn’t know anything beyond that, and with his mother gone it seems like he’s unlikely to find out. His dad, who couldn’t deal with the weirdness of it all, lives across the country, but supports Stephen financially. And Stephen, meanwhile, lives in New York City, alone. He does the things a loner kid who isn’t invisible might do: walks in the park, people-watches, goes online, hangs out. But the possibility of interaction isn’t there for him (except online: and typing is hard for him). It’s not there, that is, until Elizabeth moves in down the hall. Stephen sees her in the hall one day, wrestling with a load of shopping bags, and it becomes apparent that she can see him.
So they become friends, and then more-than-friends, and Stephen eventually tells her that he’s invisible (after some awkward moments and jokes from Elizabeth’s younger brother, Laurie, about her imaginary boyfriend) and, oh then eventually Laurie and Elizabeth and Stephen go to a comic shop where they’ve heard there’s a resident witch, who turns out to be a sweet old lady named Millie, who is actually something called a spellseeker: someone who can see curses. Which, it turns out, Elizabeth is, too. Which turns the book from a straightforward-ish teen romance into a quest narrative: Elizabeth and Laurie and Stephen set out to figure out how to break Stephen’s curse, which they can only do by confronting and defeating the person who cast it: who happens to be Stephen’s thoroughly nasty grandfather, who he’s just recently learned about from his dad.
Unfortunately, the quest narrative makes things a little more plot-driven than I would like. I liked the characters more than the plot: Stephen and his habit of making up stories about the people he sees; Laurie and his kindness, despite the fact that the world has not always been kind to him (he’s gay, and he and Elizabeth and their mom moved to New York after he was jumped and beaten by six guys at his old school in Minnesota). Partly because of the character vs. plot issue, I liked the contemporary YA romance story better than the magical quest story, though the magical parts do have some good bits: I like the way the whole book is set in NYC, the way that the magical world is overlaid on the normal one: the way that Stephen and Elizabeth start falling for each other at Bethesda Fountain and then the way that Elizabeth practices her spellseeking abilities by looking for curses on a crowded subway car, the way that a normal day in the park turns scary thanks to Stephen’s grandfather’s curses. I like the description of Times Square at night, Stephen invisibly running up “the red-lit staircase at the center” of it, and the description of a stretch of Central Park as a place “where nature draws a canopy over all the city thoughts, leaving you with a deep sense of leaves and light, people passing through and the world staying still” (25, 48).
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