Book Review: WWW – Wake (guest review by Meagan Houle)

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by blindbeader in Book reviews, Fiction

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From the first blog post I wrote about books with blind characters, I’ve been regularly encouraged to read and review Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW series, about a blind teenager who becomes friends with the World Wide Web. In my defense… I tried to read the first book, Wake. I tried more than once. But science fiction really isn’t my thing, and I found I couldn’t give the book an objective review because of it.

Thankfully, my dear friend Meagan stepped up and offered to read and review the book, and graciously allowed me to edit it and publish it here on my blog. Thanks, Meagan, for taking time out of your hectic schedule to help a friend!

About the Book

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math – and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind.
But Caitlin’s brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes.
While exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something – some other – lurking in the background. And it’s getting more and more intelligent with each passing day.

General Observations

this book is like so many sci-fi books I’ve read: the premise is absolutely fascinating, and the research is impressive. Here, our author spares us no details, and it’s clear that he’s given this book an enormous amount of careful
thought. I like his imagination, his intelligence, and his clear
commitment to fleshing out a complicated idea in a way that’s accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, character development, stilted writing and narrative flow are sacrificed in the name of a good plot. The science, while being fascinating and necessary, often crowds the story itself, dismissing the characters to a shadowy corner while the author embarks upon complex trains of thought.

Emotional Complexity

Even with a unique protagonist, it seemed that Sawyer attempted to insert excess emotional depth while leaving some characters stilted and wooden.

This isn’t to say that the author did not sometimes strike gold. There
were moments of startling brilliance in this book, where I actually
found myself tearing up. Caitlin’s interactions with Webmind, for example, while awkwardly written, are fun and engaging and wonderfully quaint. It made me
wonder what it would really be like to converse with a whole new kind of consciousness–something I’d often pondered briefly but never been moved to really sink my teeth into.

How do the Blind… do… Anything? TMI!

I began this book being quite dismayed, and mostly stayed that way throughout the book. The author, in typical scifi writer fashion, gave us far too much information about how Caitlin does every little thing. He goes so far as to explain the precise keystrokes she uses to operate her screen reader, which interrupts the flow of the text and was really distracting to me. We do not need to know that she has just hit a command to shift her computer’s focus or make her screen reader read an entire email aloud. I understand that the author is trying to help us understand blind people, but the execution is downright painful. Sadly, this pattern continued, broken only occasionally by relevant information (for instance, describing cane travel). Right through to the end, though, we’re bombarded with essentially useless trivia about how Caitlin navigates her world, even at times when it really disrupts everything else.

Nuggets of Gold

Now, the author did get a couple of things exactly right–so right it was almost uncomfortable. He pegged the social isolation, the transition from a dedicated school for the blind to a mainstream school, and the general anxiety a teenage girl will feel when she’s getting to know a new boy. When the boy in question mistreats her because of her blindness, the devastation and humiliation she experiences are achingly familiar. I sucked in my breath and skimmed for a while, not wanting to linger in that place longer than I needed to. I imagine this will have an impact on sighted readers, who understand intellectually why this behaviour would be wrong but may not be able to tell exactly how it might feel until they are forced to imagine it directly.
The other thing I liked about this character was her frustration with the world at large. She’s fiercely independent, gifted and capable, but she still has to deal with people’s perceptions of her. Her struggle to preserve bodily autonomy and personal agency are, once again, very familiar to me. While she’s still getting used to her new school, her tray is physically taken from her hands, even after she has said she does not want to have it carried for her. Her own wishes are considered irrelevant, which so often happens to us when we don’t want help and are given it nonetheless. I can identify with her annoyance and sense of futility.

The author also portrayed well the assumptions and mistakes made by parents, even when they have parented a blind child for such a long time. Caitlin still has to remind her parents that she does not use a mouse, or that she can’t perceive this or that. The moments of awkwardness stand out sharply because her family is so used to her the rest of the time. I have experienced this with my own family: 22 years later and they still slip up sometimes. I see it as an encouraging sign: it means they’re not constantly thinking of me as “other.”

Regaining Sight: the Miracle Cure

Now, to address the part of the story I have little knowledge of: the process of gaining sight when you’ve never had any. I’ve been severely visually impaired my whole life, but I do have enough sight to understand concepts like colour and light. Caitlin didn’t have any of this, so when she was given it almost all at once, I expected her to be more than excited. I expected her to be overwhelmed, anxious, even scared. I thought that all the new stimuli going to her brain would, at the very least, throw her off for a bit. While she is definitely dazzled by her new vision, and it takes her a while to learn how to use it, the transition seems far too easy to be realistic. The author portrays the blindness cure as something that will somehow turn Caitlin’s life right around and fix her. She is so gloriously happy and comfortable with her new sense almost right away, which rings false to me. Again, I can’t say what it would be like, but judging by deaf people’s reactions when they hear for the first time, it would be far more impactful than this author is making it look. Again, we have a case of the plot moving relentlessly onward, giving Caitlin hardly any time to adjust.

General Conclusions

The author had the right idea, and was working with some very interesting plot points. He captured moments of raw emotional power, and tackled controversial issues with grace. That said, the prose was often stilted, the characters poorly-developed, and the blind character awkwardly-written. I would not recommend the book to a blind person, and would hesitate to recommend it at all, as a general reader. I have little patience with clumsy writing, so while I really did want to like this book, I could hardly even finish it.

2.5/5 stars.

Book Review: For the Benefit of Those who See

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by blindbeader in Book reviews, Nonfiction

≈ 4 Comments

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ambassadorship, blindness, Books, dignity, education, independence, respect

One of my blog’s most consistently viewed posts is this one, regarding the portrayal of blind characters in books. Because of this, I’ve decided to do a monthly book review, alternating between fiction and nonfiction, beginning with this book that created quite a stir in the blind community when it was first released.

For the Benefit of Those who See

By: Rosemary Mahoney

I chose to review this book because of this article that made the rounds of social media nearly two years after its publication. I found it well-rounded and compassionate, at great odds with reviews of this book. After mentioning this disparity to a friend, I realized that I needed to read the book, to form my own opinion. Nearly a month after putting the book down, I still find myself incredibly conflicted by it. How can I be so awed by some beautiful friendships and inspired by the resilience of many of the blind students, yet put off by some of the awkward and inappropriate behavior and the fixation on everyone’s eyes?

Some Unnecessary Detours

The introduction to this book begins with a rather graphic description of an eye surgery. This is not for the squeamish. Perhaps the author uses this to reminisce about her own temporary blindness, how scared she felt. Then she uses this as a springboard to how she got involved with Braille without Borders. The first couple of chapters tend to jump around unnecessarily; I honestly found myself not caring about Rosemary herself, as her own experience of blindness was temporary and she was able to go back to her sighted life, with a seemingly perpetual fear of blindness itself. Later in the book, she describes the perception of the blind in wider western society, beginning in the eighteenth century and ending midway through the twentieth. The placement of this information was between the two sections of the book (the school in Tibet and that in India), which was quite logical, but the author didn’t cite any historical data from eastern countries, nor did she truly address the strides that have been made in western society in the past sixty years. It appeared that she viewed her ideas through the lens of a contemporary western chronicler, while not really addressing many of the true social realities that have historically been lived in the east. In these ways, the book takes off on tangents that may be informative as their own volume, but were cobbled together as a west-meets-east education model that doesn’t truly convey either particularly well.

I Did Find Inspiration Here

Unlike many other reviews by blind people, I did find myself truly awed by some of the students and their friendships portrayed in this book. I chuckled at the seriousness of the 12-year-old braille teacher, was touched by the young girl who persistently physically refused to allow a classmate to disengage by constantly praying for a cure, laughed out loud at the friendship of two loud and rather bawdy students at the school in India. Two young girls took Rosemary through a crowded Tibetan square, and showed her how they used their other senses to determine where they were; they were neither self-pitying nor constantly happy, yet they simply gave Rosemary the information they had. I was awed by many of the blind students’ resilience, not because they got up and got out of bed in the morning and did what they had to do with little or no vision, but they did so in a society that truly didn’t know what to do with them, and with little or no governmental or family assistance, sometimes fleeing truly abusive family environments.

But… But…

Some of the behaviors described in this book were truly cringe-worthy. I would hate to see any other group of people walk around with tea streaming down the backs of their shirts, waving long sticks around, crying out how glad they were to be (insert disability/race/gender here). It baffles my mind that in one breath, the heart-warming friendships and terrific adaptability of the students are wonderfully depicted, then in the next some of these same students are acting with the social grace of a toddler. It surprises me that a confident blind woman who runs the school would not address these behaviors; if she had, perhaps the author could have described the strides the students were making as she did with their computer learning. But as it stands, my western mind just can’t compute the disparity, especially in countries and cultures where cleanliness and propriety are quite important.

Educational Advantage

Two schools are described in this book. They provide food, shelter, and education for blind students, both children and adults. My opinion on blind schools has been documented here, and yet I applaud the author’s ability to detail the complex nuances and ironies at play for blind students in Tibet and India. In cultures where families run farms, and sighted children work on the farm, their blind child/sibling has an opportunity for an education. It’s one of the few times in which blindness has its own unique advantage.

Fixation on Eyes

I grew very uncomfortable with the author’s seemingly endless descriptions of people’s eyes. Many blind people wish we could make eye contact, but are uncertain how best to do this appropriately. Some of us are self-conscious about how our eyes appear to others, and based on the never-ending descriptions in this book, we have every right to be. Very few, if any people, were described as having nice eyes, and it appears that those who did have “normal” eyes had their blindness questioned by the author because of their confidence and social normality (see above). If eyes are the window to the soul, I’d hate to think of how soulless we are.

Conclusion

There are some nuggets of beauty in this book. Unfortunately, they are dispersed throughout outdated, unnecessary, and demeaning information. Even now, more than a month after concluding this book, I can’t seem to get it out of my head. As someone who lives in the “world of the blind”, I object to the characterization of us – of me – based on what my eyes do or don’t do, and the truly horrid manners exemplified in these pages. And yet, I draw inspiration, perhaps as the author intended, from the depictions of deep friendships, of learning despite the naysaying of family and society, of falling down and getting back up. I am glad I chose not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but that bathwater is truly quite murky.