Item: Love and First Sight
Rating: 5.00
Author: leahmichelle

by Josh Sundquist

After a lifetime attending a school for the blind, sixteen-year-old Will Porter's first day at a mainstream high school went about as well as he expected. He accidentally grazed a girl's boob when reaching for a handrail on the stairs, he sat on another student in the cafeteria, and he somehow drove a new classmate to tears without saying a word. His high school career can only go up from there, right?

As Will starts to find his footing, he develops a crush on a charming, quiet girl name Cecily. And despite his fear that having a girlfriend will make him inherently dependent on someone sighted, the two of them grow closer and closer. Then an unprecedented opportunity arises: an experimental surgery that could give Will eyesight for the first time in his life. But learning to see is more difficult than Will could have ever imagined, and as he adjusts to his new sense, he finds the sighted world has been keeping more secrets from him than he realized. It turns out that the girl he's been falling for doesn't meet traditional definitions of beauty. In fact, everything he'd heard about her appearance now appears to be a lie engineered by their so-called friends to get the two of them together. Does it matter what Cecily looks like? No, not really. But then why does Will feel so betrayed?

Told in Will's voice as he transitions from blind to sighted, this is a story about the nature of perception, love, trust, and romantic attraction. With moments of breathtaking poignancy, it's about how we relate to each other and the world around us, and how true friendship is one thing you don't need to be able to see to believe.

Love and First Sight is one of those books you just know you’re going to love – I just knew it was my kinda book and I raced through it in just sittings. I remember reading Josh’s memoir We Should Hang Out Sometime, which I really enjoyed and that was why I was so excited to read Love and First Sight, I know how good a writer Josh is and this absolutely proves it to me because I loved Love and First Sight.

The most shocking, stark thing about reading Love and First Sight was how I clearly take my eyesight for granted. To go into Will’s world, into complete darkness, and even more than that, when Will is offered the treatment to have vision, and it’s not just waking up and seeing things and knowing what they are was so, so scary. Can you imagine opening your eyes and not being able to understand what you’re seeing? No? Me neither. I very much take for granted my ability to look at my fingers and know that they’re fingers. To look at a picture and understand perception and depth. To know a book is shaped like a rectangle. For Will to not understand any of that made my heart break.

What I also loved about the book was the friendships between Will, Ion, Nick, Whitford, and Cecily. How their little group accepts Will is amazing, and they just fall into a routine of hanging out together, without Will being blind being an issue, but it’s really the friendship between Will and Cecily that made me so happy. It’s just this amazing thing, two people who just seemed to have found the right person that they never even knew they needed. *Happy sigh* Going to the art museum, watching a sunrise (well, Cecily watches the sunrise), homecoming, it was all just so perfect.

Love and First Sight was just an amazing read. It made me laugh, it made me want to cry, it made me appreciate the fact that I can see way more than anything ever has done. Josh Sundquist is a fantastic writer, I felt like I was with Will every step of the book, and I just loved every page, this was such a cracking fiction debut, and everyone needs to read this book, it’s so, so cute.

Love and First Sight

by Josh Sundquist

Reviewed by Leah on Oct 22, 2016

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