Hello there you invisible people. It’s been a while since I made this weekly series, but it should come out on time for now on. Today as you read in the title, i’ll be reviewing Things Not Seen by Andrew Clements, the author of Frindle.
I only found out that this is one book of a trilogy after googling the book title so that I could get a picture of the cover, so I might read the next two books in the future.
I’m not positive about the first time I read this book, but I believe it was around the time that I read Brave Story, because I also remember buying the book at McKays. The first time I read the book, I was thinking of how different my life would be if one day I woke up and I was invisible. Needless to say, I was grateful I was visible.
On to the review part of the section!
After reading the book for the first time in a few years, i’ve been reminded of what it does well and the few slip-ups it has. My absolute favorite thing about the book, which seems to connect all of my favorite books to me, is that I can relate to the main character’s feelings and thoughts. This is a pretty simple thing, but it really makes a difference. Take The Outsiders for example. That book won the Margaret A. Edwards award and it continues to relate to teenagers 50 years after it’s publication. Clements’ writing stays reliably interesting the whole book through, and the characters stay lively, and do a pretty good job escaping the archetypes of book characters in Young Adult books.
*Minor Spoilers*
I also think it was very clever to have one of the only people Bobby could trust with his invisibility’s secret someone who it wouldn’t make a difference to, Alicia. Their bonding over the novel was done really well in my opinion, and I think that the conclusion finished up that chapter of their relationship nicely.
*Minor Spoilers End*
There are only two problems that I had with the novel, one of which being how it wrapped up perfectly. I hadn’t really thought about this as a problem before, but a friend said they had read the book and that was their criticism, so I took it into account. As I finished the book, I realized that they were correct. It ends in a perfect little knot. While I still liked the book’s ending, I can still understand that this is kind of a problem.
The other problem is that they never told the reader at the end of the book that there would be more books in the series! I literally didn’t even know that this was a trilogy until I looked the book up, like I said earlier. I think that it’s definitely a problem if you don’t let your audience know that they don’t have the full story at the end of the book. It ended well enough that I never even considered that there was more to the story.
Overall, not really enough problems to warrant any major point deductions.
9/10, not perfect, but better than average.
Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom of this review!
I just had the idea that maybe instead of a Dictionary Taboo on these reviews, I could leave hints for what the next book will be, so i’m going to be doing that now!
Hints for Next Review: computer program comes to life
Baiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
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