“One final time I told myself I wasn’t abducting my little brother”: this is the start of She Is Not Invisible, and it certainly made me want to keep reading. The narrator is Laureth Peak, who’s sixteen; her brother, Benjamin, is seven. They’re at the airport, about to check in for a flight from London to New York. Laureth’s dad, a writer, seems to be missing: she had thought he was in Switzerland, but he’s been out of contact for days, and when she checked his email (she normally helps him out by replying to common questions with form letters), she saw something that made her worried: someone in New York has his notebook, which contains his ideas and research, and which he’d never part with willingly. When Laureth tries to tell her mom how worried she is, her mom doesn’t really listen, and so Laureth decides she’d better go to New York, meet the person who has her dad’s notebook, and find her dad. But Laureth is blind, which is why she needs Benjamin: she can’t make her way around a new city alone.
And so Laureth, Benjamin, and Benjamin’s stuffed raven, Stan, fly across the Atlantic, with a plan to meet the “Mr. Michael Walker” who has their dad’s notebook at a library in Queens, and very little idea of what they’ll do beyond that. Their dad has been working on what they call “that book,” which he’s been working on for a long time: it’s a book about coincidences, and his research for it has become all-encompassing. He can’t write anything else, but he can’t write it, either. Part of the problem, he thinks, is the nature of coincidences themselves: as he’s explained to Laureth and Benjamin, coincidences feel meaningful to the person experiencing them, but that feeling is extremely hard to convey: a coincidence recounted to someone else either feels unextraordinary or unbelievable; coincidences are either “so pathetic that they don’t excite anyone but you,” or “so incredible that they are literally just that” (40). There’s lots about coincidence in this book: the coincidence that Laureth’s dad experienced that made him want to write about them, snippets of his research on coincidences, and the coincidences that Laureth and Benjamin experience as they search for their dad. Do coincidences mean anything, or do we only notice them because we’re good at noticing patterns, and do they only feel like they mean something because we want them to? If Laureth’s dad feels like he sees the number 354 everywhere, to the extent that it becomes “his number,” does that mean it’s everywhere for him, or does that mean he’s looking out for it? Do coincidences say something about the nature of the universe, or about the nature of being human?
The parts of this book focused on people are maybe the most interesting: I love Laureth’s relationship with her brother, and the way she navigates the world and people’s reactions to her blindness. Between that, and the thinky/philosophical bits about coincidences (the book reproduces whole passages of Laureth’s dad’s notebook as a way of introducing/explaining various topics), and the suspense/adventure aspect of Laureth’s missing father, it sometimes felt like there was too much going on, or like this book didn’t know what kind of book it wanted to be. But the strength of Laureth’s narration helped hold it together, and I’m glad I read it.
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