Blindsided! A Blind Guide to Normal by Beth Vrabel

"Seriously, though, guys. Try to hold it together without me. Someone will need to keep an eye out the newbies.

"Shall I save the pupil for you?" said Alice, slicing the cake.

"Absolutely," I grinned and passed out slices of my giant farewell eyeball cake.

"I can't help it," I said. "I'm just so... I can't wait for next year, to get back to normal. Be surrounded by normal--" I bit off the stupid thing I was going to say, but it was too late. Alice's face flushed again. Man, I can be such a jerk sometimes.

It should have hit me then--being celebrated like a departing rock star. Because here's the joke for you. Where can a cocky, one-eyed ginger be the coolest cat around?

Punchline: Only at a school for the blind.

And maybe not even there, given the way he's bombed his farewell address to his classmates. With one artificial eye (Artie for short) and partial sight in the other, Richie Ryder Raymond hopes that his talent for the quick quip will see him through his transfer from Addison School for the Blind to a normal, that is, regular eighth grade class at Papuaville Middle, home of the Fighting Guinea Pigs. With a name like that, the comic possibilities seem endless.

But it doesn't begin well, as he squints his way through the halls, trying to see the room numbers and maybe spot the gorgeous girl next door.

Yep. Room 206! I guess I was being too self-congratulatory to notice the love of my life was standing beside me. I ran right into Jocelyn. She fell backward into the boy behind her.

"Hey!" "Watch where you're going!" a guy barked. "I don't think he saw me," said Jocelyn. "Of course, he saw you!" the guy said. He put his arm around her.

"No, man, I didn't!" The guy jerked his chin at me. He had brilliant green eyes and the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a boy. I blurted out. "Do you have to brush your eyelashes? Because they are mega, mega long!"

"You're a freak!" Lash Boy hissed as everyone laughed. "What the heck is wrong with you?"

A hand clamped down on my shoulder and Lash boy's. Oh, great. Perfect way to meet my homeroom teacher.

"I am ashamed of how you would treat a differently-abled student!" she yelled at Lash Boy.

Ryder is outed as "differently abled," and although he tries to explain what happened, his teacher tells Lash Boy (a.k.a., Jocelyn's boyfriend Max) that she's calling his parents. Ryder's hopes of slipping in under the radar are dashed, and now Max, the class golden boy, will have it in for him forever, which is not good, given that Ryder already has a crush on Jocelyn.

And that's just the beginning of his problem with being "normal." Living for the year with Gramps while his dad is doing research in Alaska is not easy. Gramps seems stuck in the 1970s, still grieving over the death of his wife at the birth of Ryder's dad. Her weird monument, a stone horse, stands in the middle of the front yard, decorated for all seasons and holidays, and his little house is decorated in stereotypical seventies style. Gramps plays disco constantly in his old Oldsmobile, and talks about Ryder's grandmother as if she's still alive. Ryder's mom must find that a bit creepy, too, because she takes to working unusually long hours to avoid being there whenever she can.

But Jocelyn lives next door, and Ryder soon learns that her little brother died in a fire and that she was rescued by Max when they were eight years old. Adding that to the fact that Max is considered a hero, a real Mr. Nice Guy at school, Ryder figures his chances with Jocelyn are dimmer than his vision.

And Ryder’s hopes of getting to normal don’t grow any brighter when he and Gramps walk into an argument outside Home Depot, where Max is fund-raising for a project for grief counseling.

Gramps and I were each downing our second hot dogs when the fight began. I heard “Max, I don’t want to talk about this!” all but screamed by Jocelyn. “I’m so sick of your nonstop gotta-help-everyone-all-the-time crap.”

“Crap?” Max said, pleading. “Come on, Jocelyn. It’s been years. Your brother would want us to keep other kids from going through what we.... His voice went thick with passion. “Just let yourself remember!”

I punched Max Waters in the face.

And then Max gets even by tripping Ryder in the cafeteria. Artie the artificial eye pops out, skitters across the floor, followed by retreating girls screeching and guys kicking it around the room. And for the punchline, at first Ryder finds that he’s got no joke, nothing.

Artie comes to rest in front of his homeroom teacher, Miss Singer, who picks it up, her pity radiating from her, and looks around for Ryder.

I slammed a big old NOPE sign on the pain stew in my gut. I reached for my eye. I climbed on top of a chair. Cupping Artie in my hand, I rubbed it on the hem of my shirt. I slowly, slowly, slowly popped the eye back into place.

Then, arms out, like this was all a huge theatrical joke, I bowed–-three times in fact.

It seems that nobody, not Gramps, or Mom and Dad, or Max and Jocelyn, nobody is really normal. They all have things they don’t want to think about. But sometimes you have to look at those things with both eyes open. In her sequel to A Blind Guide to Stinkville, the forthcoming A Blind Guide to
Normal (Sky Pony Press, 2016), Ryder finds that maybe normal is accepting a new normal that includes anger, sadness, and loss. And they’re all okay. With a moving cathartic conclusion, Vrabel fashions a coming-of-age story that middle readers will never forget.

Ryder's honest first person voice is funny, yet poignant, one that gets the reader right inside him, seeing the world through his eye. Each character has a way to hide, something inside he or she try to cover up and forget. Jocelyn has her scars hidden under long sleeves, the outward reminders of her guilt for her little brother's death, Max has his own secret of starting that fatal fire, and Ryder's parents have their own fears that his cancer might return. Gramps has his grief for his wife and the signs of her existence he can't bear to remove from his life--all things that make them different, yet make them normal human beings. Says School Library Journal, "A sweet, thoughtful, and funny read--a heartfelt tale without the typical saccharine coating."

Blindsided: Blind Spot by Laura Ellen

It should have been a no-brainer. I was returning to the same halls I’d occupied last year. A seasoned vet, not some scared, insecure freshman.

I took a steadying breath. I squinted at the room numbers. I was looking for room 22, Life Skills.

At that last turn, I stopped. Someone in a brown, hooded cloak twirled, twirled, twirled in the middle of the hallway. A garment like that meant immediate social suicide, but in a deserted hallway, it meant something else.

Special Ed.

There had to be some mistake. This was not my room.

Diagnosed in her freshman year with juvenile macular degeneration, Roz feels that she can make it as a regular student, navigating by her peripheral vision and sitting in the front of the classroom. Now she finds herself in a room of special ed students, with a teacher, Mr. Dellian, who seems determined to give her a hard time. It is even worse when she discovers that he is also her AP history teacher, and when she gets lost on the way to that class and hurriedly takes the first empty seat she can spot, one in the back, he insists that, having chosen that seat, she has to sit there all semester. Even worse, in that Life Skills class, Mr. Dellian assigns her to be the partner of the crazy twirling girl, Tricia Farni.

But it is Tricia who gets Roz involved in that Life Skills class in a way she never expected. Tricia claims to be a recovering heroin addict, and when Roz finds her in the restroom shaking and begging her to find her some pot to keep her off the hard stuff, Roz reluctantly agrees to provide the money and go with Jonathan, hockey star and full-time most popular guy, to get Tricia what she needs. Roz can’t believe what she’s doing, but she does believe what she is feeling for Jonathan, who calls her “Beautiful” and asks her out, making her feel, not special in the life skills way, but normal in the way everyone in high school wants to be.

But Mr. Dellian continues to be a daily problem. Roz needs to do well in AP history, but if she sits in front where she can see the board, Dellian counts her absent for not sitting in her “assigned” seat. Roz manages to keep up only with the notes another student, Greg, prints off in enlarged font for her and with his partnering with her on class projects. Appeals to the counselor and principal to change her schedule fail, and Roz decides to try to hang on until the end of the semester. Dating Jonathan takes some of the pain out of Chase High School, and her study time with Greg is surprisingly something she looks forward to each week.

But at a party which goes out of control, Roz finds Tricia and Jonathan together, and something frightening happens, something she can only dimly recall, like a bad dream in which Jonathan, Tricia, and even Mr. Dellian are all mixed up. And then, Tricia disappears, and when her body is found in a frozen river, Roz knows that someone murdered her that night and that her own lost memories are the key to Tricia’s death.

The thing about alien life is there’s no universally accepted proof that it exists. Belief is left to the individual.

Truth is like that, too. It isn’t necessarily universal. Sometimes what we see, what seems real, isn’t real at all.

After Greg left, I struggled with this. What was truth, what was fiction, and could I spot the difference? Once upon a time I thought I could.

What if I was wrong about Jonathan? What if he wasn’t telling me everything?

If truth had to come down to evidence, then I needed to find some.

Laura Ellen’s forthcoming Blind Spot (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,  2012) uses the legally-blind Roz tos show that physical attraction has the power to blind teenagers to the truth. As the page-turning plot twists and turns toward its suspenseful ending, the truth itself flickers and reassembles itself in Roz’s eyes. A nearly blind sophomore as sleuth makes for an original murder mystery concept, but author Laura Ellen’s characters are well drawn and engaging, even if their choices along the way sometimes make the reader want to give them a shake. Despite a sometimes improbable story line, Ellen delivers an absorbing read with some real insights for the reader. “Roz is an enormously appealing narrator,” says Kirkus Reviews, and along the way to a unexpected conclusion, young adult readers can learn a lot from seeing what unfolds through her eyes.

Taking Another Look: Teacher's Pet by Laurie Halse Anderson

Gran was right. Middle school is not as bad as I thought it would be.

It's worse.

My locker is two miles away from my classes, so I have to lug my books in a backpack all day. Each book feels like it weights fifty pounds.

All my teachers give us homework. I'm never going to get through it all, not even if I work all weekend. I wish I could go home right now and never come back.

But not yet. I have to suffer through one more class: science.

It began as a great summer for Maggie Mackenzie, helping out with her friends at her grandmother's veterinary clinic and going to the beach with the Vet Volunteers. But the final days of summer have been spoiled by the thoughts of starting seventh grade at John C. Calhoun Middle School.

Maggie's not anxious about having friends--her fellow volunteers, Brenna, Zoe, Sunita, and David, will be there too. But Maggie's knows she's not good at school: her reading is still a problem and she only finished sixth grade because Gran forced her to buckle down and work with a tutor to raise her grades. Now she has five teachers, each piling on more work than there was in sixth grade altogether. Maggie struggles with the fear that she's just not smart enough to make it through middle and high school, much less college and vet school as she had hoped.

But science class is a surprise. For openers, there is a dog in the classroom--a beautiful German Shepherd named Scout--and a long row of cages filled with mice, gerbils, hamsters, and a rabbit that she and the volunteers offer to care for. But the teacher, Mr. Carlson, is the big surprise. The dog, Scout, is there as his guide dog. Maggie learns that Carlson has been working with Scout only a week, and "dog whisperer" that she is, Maggie senses that Scout is anxious for the love and approval from his master which he is not getting.

That weekend, as Maggie struggles with her overwhelming school work, Mr. Carlson shows up at her grandmother's veterinary clinic, Dr. Mac's Place, remorseful because in his anxiety over being lost in the school building he has stepped on Scout's foot. As Gran treats the cut paw, Maggie learns that her teacher is also struggling with his new situation, having recently lost his sight and been forced to try to teach with the help of a service dog.

When Maggie fails her first science pop quiz, Mr. Carlson is empathetic with her feelings about the stepped-up requirements of middle school and promises to work with Gran and the school counselor to make sure that she learns and keeps up with her work. But it is not until Mr. Carlson and Scout are hit by a careless motorist and Scout suffers near fatal injuries that teacher and pupil realize that the changes required by their new situations are alike in many ways. As Mr. Carlson offers Maggie advice, she realizes that he is also speaking about his own problems from the heart.

Some kids make the adjustment to middle school with no problems. They make it look easy. But most of the kids I know stumble over something. They lose friends; they get cut from a team, or they run up against a tough subject for the first time. There are all kinds of obstacles. You need some help learning to go around them.

We'll do whatever it takes--arrange for extra help during study hall, help you with study skills, test your reading skills. You aren't stupid, Maggie. You just need--a guide.

Award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson's Teacher's Pet #7 (Vet Volunteers), (Puffin, 2009) now in a just-published paperback edition, offers an empathetic and unique look at the oft-portrayed middle school scene in this second book about Maggie Mackenzie, first introduced in Fight for Life #1 (Vet Volunteers). Like the other protagonists in this series, Maggie is a believable and appealing character whose love and desire for the humane care for animals gives her life meaning and direction, but who nonetheless deals daily with the problems of growing up and succeeding in school. Adult figures are also realistically presented, many (but not all) with good qualities, but who also confront the small and large problems that life brings. Incidental information about the training of guide dogs at the famous Seeing Eye facility add to the interest of this book.

Teacher's Pet #7 (Vet Volunteers),is another capable entry in an outstanding series for animal-loving 'tween readers. For other wildly popular books about young veterinary assistants, see Ben Baglio's prolific Animal Ark series.