The Visibles

By Sara Shepard

Book Overview

Emotional, issue-led fiction perfect for all fans of The Memory Keeper's Daughter and Jodi Picoult Tragedy came as if so often does: a teenage party, emotions running high, followed by a horrific car... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416597360
• ISBN13: 9781416597360
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 323 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Engrossing Novel

Sara Shepard's The Visibles is a magnificent book. It follows brilliant but troubled Summer Davis from her early teens to her mid-twenties. After her mother deserts the family and her brother distances himself as well, Summer is left to deal with her severely depressed father on her own. While devoting herself to caring for her father, and then later for a great-aunt with terminal cancer, Summer avoids dealing with her own problems at all costs. Obsessed as she is with genetics and DNA, it can't escape her notice that many of her own actions could me signs of mental illness like her father's. But Summer does her best to avoid addressing the issue. Summer's story is interspersed with snippets of her father's life captured through a series of letters he writes while hospitalized, and together the two stories create a truly captivating novel. This is a very intimate look at both depression and family dynamics, and it is written beautifully. I sat down and read it all in one day. If you're looking for a good novel, give this a try.

Accessible, compelling story with fascinating characters

This book was written by an author known for young adult fiction, and the style reflects this in the best way. It is highly accessible and, on the surface, light reading, but is also thought-provoking and I am certain it will stay with me for a long time to come. Over the course of the story, the main character, Summer, goes from adolescence to adulthood just as the author went from writing teen/young adult fiction to adult fiction. Summer and her father are devastated by her mother's abrupt abandonment of them, and is struck by a lecture by a high school sub in her science class. The idea that DNA defines us and links us inextricably to our parents is a very powerful one for Summer. She takes comfort in the objectivity of science and study of DNA, and at the same time, fears it, because her father succumbs to mental illness after his wife leaves them and Summer is aware that this may be genetic. Throughout the story, both she and her father long for control, and, not coincidentally, both are scientists. Summer's first person narrative is interrupted at regular intervals by letters her father writes while in the throes of his mental illness and deep depression. These letters are not addressed clearly to specific people, but over the course of the story, the recipients become clear. His letters are in a different font from the rest of the book, setting them apart. This is a very accessible and compelling book that can be appreciated by a wide range of ages, from late teen on up. The author has a very visual style, painting vivid pictures with language, with great attention to detail. The character studies are intriguing, and the mysteries of the past unfold over the course of the story, continually drawing the reader in. I found myself reading this book very quickly, never putting it down for long, and immediately recommended it to friends afterwards.

What Connects Us To Who We Are

To be completely honest, I didn't have high expectations for this book from the first page. The font was wonky, it was written in a clunky second-person perspective, and was hard to follow. (And in my head, I was already writing the review, picturing the throwing of the book at high velocity out the window.) Luckily, though, I stuck with it through the chapter, and what followed was nothing short of engrossing. Sara Shepard weaves a complicated story of a family -- both biological and chosen -- tortured and changed by legacies left by the generations before. Each section is a helix from Summer's own personal emotional DNA, so to speak, creating who she will eventually become. I ended up reading this in one sitting (and the second-person perspective became clear further along, thankfully). And I can, without reservation, say it's one of the best books I've read this year. If you've got a day to kill and a need for a great story, pick it up.

An Amazing First Novel

I loved The Visibles. The author's transition into adult fiction is a true success. The author obviously did her homework on the issue of mental illness, but the novel is about so much more! If one chooses to look deeper, the symbolism and contrasts between things lost, (Twin Towers) and things found (new beginnings) is thought provoking. At the end of the day, it's the smallest issues in life that matter the most. Just when the novel needs it, humor takes over in the form of Aunt Stella, the family matriarch. I thought the characters rang true, as well as the plot, and I loved the ending!

Sara Shepard Successfully Bridges the Gap Between YA and Adult Audience

It's sometimes hard for a young adult author, especially one as well known as Sara Shepard, to make the shift to successfully publishing novels for adult audiences. But THE VISIBLES, her first book to be marketed to adults, successfully bridges that gap. Fittingly, it's about a young woman who is learning to negotiate the fine balance between being someone's daughter and becoming one's own person. Shepard's episodic novel opens with a harrowing vignette, one that becomes increasingly haunting as the story progresses and the reader learns new information. A young man, about to leave his small town in western Pennsylvania to attend the state university, accidentally kills the girl he secretly loves in a horrendous car crash. Suddenly, it's 1992, decades later, and that young man is now a father of two teenaged children. Summer Davis, his daughter, is in high school and has just discovered DNA in high school biology, a topic that will shape the way she views her entire life and her family's whole history. Summer's mother has just mysteriously disappeared, abandoning her family without a trace. Her father is distraught, her older brother buries himself in schoolwork, and Summer is left without a compass to guide her. As the years pass, and Summer grows from an awkward teenager to a brilliant but vulnerable young woman, she continues to search for the elusive guidance to how her family ended up the way it did: why her mother disappeared, why her father has become devastated by clinical depression, why her brother develops wacky conspiracy theories, and why Summer herself continues to find more questions than answers. Again and again, her thoughts turn to genetics, almost despite herself: "On one hand, it was what I believed in, but on the other, it was exactly what I fought against." Is Summer doomed by biological determinism to share in her family's legacy of loss and despair? Or will she be able to escape destiny and craft a future for herself? Shepard's novel heartbreakingly captures the simultaneous pathos and angst of caring for a relative with mental illness, as Summer is asked to shoulder responsibilities far beyond her years, to make sacrifices she shouldn't have to, to constantly revise her childhood image of her father. Shepard also distills the absurdity of painful situations into single, perfectly apt images: "There would be old biddies coming over to my grandmother's house for an after-funeral party, if you could call it that, and there would be cabbage rolls, and various other things cooked in a Crock-Pot. Tomorrow morning we'd go back to Brooklyn and resume our normal lives of ignoring each other." What's most surprising and affecting about THE VISIBLES is just how emotionally invested its audience becomes in Summer and her family. Throughout, the novel builds in intensity until readers will feel, like Summer herself, that their own lives are intimately entangled with the DNA of the Davis family. --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl