Things Not Seen

Things Not Seen, Andrew Clements, Scholastic, 2002.  

Things Not Seen tells the story of Bobby Phillips, a fifteen-year-old boy, who wakes up one morning to find himself invisible.  Bobby learns that adults do not always have all the answers when his professor and scientist parents are at a loss as for what to do.  Unable to go to school, Bobby’s boredom soon leads him to venture outside and test the limits of exploration as an invisible person.  He meets a blind girl named Alicia in the library, and they eventually form an unlikely friendship.  Alicia’s struggles with the incident that blinded her and changed her life forever make her understanding of what Bobby is going through.  Their families meet, and Alicia’s astronomer dad helps Bobby’s father as the characters race to find a cure for Bobby’s invisibility before his status as a missing child gets his parents into legal trouble.

This novel would work for a middle-school audience even though its protagonist is high-school age.  The writing style is straightforward and easy to understand.  Parental authority versus personal autonomy is a theme the protagonist struggles with, and this is a concept many young adolescents deal with on a daily basis.  Identity is also a main theme, because the time Bobby spends invisible helps him to decide who he is when everything he is normally judged by, and normally judges others by, disappears.