Book Review: Sight by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Book: Sight
Author: Adrienne Maria Vrettos
Published: 2007

Dylan has a secret.

When she was five years old, she saw a classmate's dead body in a vision. Three days later, the police found Clarence's body. Ever since then, she's seen dead or dying children, always too late. She does her best to deal with it, though. She helps the police with kidnapping cases and keeps it a deep, dark secret, even from her closest friends.

Then Cate comes to Pine Mountain and somehow, Dylan finds herself spilling all to this flatlander stranger. What she doesn't know is that Cate has secrets too . . . and she's not the only one.

One of the most interesting things about this book was that Vrettos took some time to explore the effect of a child's murder on other children, even years later. There's one scene where everybody who was in Clarence's kindergarten class takes turns to tell the story to Cate. They've told the story to each other over and over, so many times that it's acquired a pattern of who says what when, and that routine is now part of the memory. The murderer himself has become a formless monster that shadows their shared childhoods.

Dylan's struggle to make sense of her gift and the way it affects her friends and family form the core of a compelling book about the secrets we keep and the destruction they wreak. The child-killer mystery itself gets a little lost among all the other plot threads--I never got a sense of why the murderer did what he did, for instance--but I still enjoyed it immensely.