The only piece of information that Summer Davis takes away from her
years at Peninsula Upper School -- one of the finest in the
Brooklyn Heights-to-Park Slope radius, to quote the promotional
materials -- is the concept that DNA defines who we are and forever
ties us to our relatives. A loner by circumstance, a social outcast
by nature, and a witty and warm narrator of her own unimaginable
chaos by happenstance, Summer hangs on to her interest in genetics
like a life raft, in an adolescence marked by absence: her
beautiful, aloof mother abandons the family without a trace; her
father descends into mental illness, haunted by a lifelong burning
secret and abetted by a series of letters that he writes to make
sense of his feelings; her best friend Claire drifts out of
Summer's life in a breeze of indifference, feigned on both sides;
and her older brother fluctuates between irrational fury and
unpredictable tenderness in an inaccessible world of his making.
Uncertain of her path and unbalanced by conflicting impulses
toward hope and escape, Summer stays close to her father while
attending college, taking him to electro-shock therapy treatments
and trying to make sense of his inscrutable past. Upon his
departure for a new and possibly recovered life, Summer begins to
question the role of genetics and whether she is destined to live
out her family's legacy of despair. But it is only when Summer
decides to leave New York herself and put off a promising science
career to take care of her great-aunt Stella -- bedrock of the
family and bastion of folksy wisdom, irreverent insight, and
Sinatra memorabilia in a less-than-scenic part of the Pennsylvanian
countryside -- that Summer begins to learn that her biography
doesn't have to define her...and that her future, like her DNA,
belongs to her alone.
In a novel consumed by the uncertainties of science, the flaws
of our parents, and enough loss and longing to line a highway, Sara
Shepard is a penetrating chronicler of the adolescence we all carry
into adulthood: how what happens to you as a kid never leaves you,
how the fallibility of your parents can make you stronger, and how
being right isn't as important as being wise. From the backwoods of
Pennsylvania to the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, "The Visibles"
investigates the secrets of the past, and the hidden corners of our
own hearts, to find out whether real happiness is a gift or a
choice.
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