Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jun 2006, 304 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2007, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
Buy This Book
Not wishing to beat about the bush on this, let me tell you up
front that I just loved this book! When selecting titles to recommend I
look for books that will both entertain and inform (because life is too short to
spend it reading lightweight fluff, but equally who wants to spend their
hard-earned leisure time reading dull, weighty tomes?), in particular I look for
books that give me the opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes
- for example, books that take me to a place that I don't know or put me inside the
brain of somebody quite different to myself. McGovern has done the latter
quite brilliantly - I really felt that I was seeing the world through the eyes
of her lead protagonists.
Eye Contact has a wide cast of characters (one reviewer felt a few too many)
but they are all well-drawn and, on the whole, ring true. The most richly
imagined are Cara, Adam's mother, and Morgan, a troubled 13-year-old boy who's
determined to solve the crime as a way to atone for his own perceived guilt.
McGovern wraps all these richly drawn characters and a host of astute insights
around a gripping mystery which twists and turns down a good few dead ends
before arriving at its unexpected conclusion - making the whole package
irresistible.
Selected Reviews
"Meticulously researched and emotionally absorbing, this provocative page-turner
also addresses an important issue—how to educate and care for children with
special needs." - PW.
"Tightly woven and gripping, this literary mystery takes several unexpected
twists and turns as it builds to the resolution." - Booklist.
"Their narrow suburban world is populated by an excessive number of damaged
souls laboring to rebuild their lives; it all reads too much as case study.
Nevertheless, the narrative moves like a freight train, and its conclusion will
leave no reader unmoved." - Kirkus.
This review
first ran in the August 2, 2006
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
If you liked Eye Contact, try these:
by Vince Vawter
Published 2014
For fans of To Kill a Mockingbird, The King's Speech, and The Help. A boy who stutters comes-of-age in the segregated South, during the summer that changes his life.
by Michael Sears
Published 2013
Jason Stafford is a former Wall Street hotshot who made some bad moves, paid the price with two years in prison, and is now trying to put his life back together. He's unemployable, until an investment firm asks him to look into possible problems left by a junior trader who died recently in an accident. What he discovers is big - there are ...
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
