The Art of Seeing: A Novel - Hardcover

McGovern, Cammie

3.41

294 ratings by Goodreads

9780743228350: The Art of Seeing: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743228359 ISBN 13: 9780743228350

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

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Idolizing her teen movie actress sister Rozzie, Jemma accompanies her older sibling to the sets and social scenes of her glamorous life, and in the wake of her own budding ambitions, learns that Rozzie is suffering from a dangerous eye disease.

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Review:

A surprising novel of sisterhood, The Art of Seeing hinges on the twin cataclysms of fame and disability. Jemma is the half-adoring, half-resentful younger sister of Rozzie, a difficult girl with a flair for the dramatic, who startles her family by becoming a movie actress and minor celebrity while still in high school. Everywhere Jemma can go in life, it seems that Rozzie has already been there. That Rozzie has been concealing severe problems with her vision and will eventually be plunged into blindness while on a movie set seems to promise only a reversal of roles, with Jemma becoming the stronger and more capable sister: the sister with a future. This is the classic stuff of sibling relations and the reason that the first half of Cammie McGovern's novel, however well-crafted, is somewhat predictable. But readers who stay the course will be rewarded by the ever-more-intricate spirals of the second half of this thoughtful debut, which calls to mind the close-focus writing of Amy Bloom. The author, incidentally, is the younger sister of actress Elizabeth McGovern, which may have helped in her deft, undazzled depiction of the movie world. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Cammie McGovern was a Stegner Fellow and received the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction. Her fiction has been published in Redbook, Seventeen, Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, and other journals. She lives with her husband and two small children in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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