Book review: Evidence of Things Not Seen by Lindsey Lane

When high school junior Tommy Smythe goes missing, everyone has a theory about what happened to him. Tommy was adopted, so maybe he ran away to find his birth parents. He was an odd kid, often deeply involved in his own thoughts about particle physics, so maybe he just got distracted and wandered off. He was last seen at a pull-out off the highway, so maybe someone drove up and snatched him. Or maybe he slipped into a parallel universe. Tommy believes that everything is possible, and that until something can be proven false, it is possibly true. So as long as Tommy’s whereabouts are undetermined, he could literally be anywhere.

Told in a series of first-person narratives from people who knew Tommy and third-person chapters about people who find the things Tommy left behind—his red motorbike, his driving goggles, pages from his notebook—Particles explores themes of loneliness, connectedness, and the role we play in creating our own realities.

Received an ARC as a gift from someone I follow on Twitter.

Evidence of Things Not Seen is an interesting book, in that I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like it before.  While it’s obvious the author was trying to make it mysterious, so that we’re never quite sure whether the boy was kidnapped, wandered off, or if he really could have slipped into an alternate dimension.  This is told by alternating chapters that are from the point of view of one or two people, and each chapter only loosely relates to any others, so other than cameos, you never really see other characters again.

Of course some things you do find out about, because a new character is related to the last, but it still seems a bit disjointed to be called a novel.  And while I’m not exactly squeamish, quite a lot of the chapters center simply around abuse.  While of course it’s a horrible thing, I feel like perhaps the writer didn’t think it through too much and simply went for shock value for a lot of the book.

While I did enjoy finishing it, I wouldn’t say that it was anything special.  The disjointed chapters, sudden resolution and the fact that it feels like the author was going for shock factor a lot didn’t put it at anything above average in my mind.