Customer Reviews

Invisible Boy

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In 1990 in Manhattan, former socialite Madeline Dare is happy with her marriage to blue-collar Dean though she does not like their dumpy Union Square apartment that she and her spouse share with her sister and their friend. Still she does not miss her former lifestyle of the rich and socially Mayflower prominence nor her exile to the Berkshires as she accepts being poor.

Madeline runs into her distant cousin Cate Ludlam, who is leading a clean-up of Prospect Cemetery in Queens. Unable to say no, Madeline is drafted to pull weed duty. However, she finds the skeletal remains of a young child, who turns out to be missing three years old Teddy Underhill. Refusing to stay out of the NYPD inquiry, Madeline learns that the little boy was an abuse victim of his mother and her boyfriend.

Unlike The Crazy School or A Field of Darkness amateur sleuthing stints, Invisible Boy is more a condemning look at society that is run by class status, heritage elitism and racial stereotyping; as justice is not blind to the affluent or the poor albeit treated differently. Readers will appreciate Madeline's daring exploits in Manhattan and Queens as she refuses to back down from a system that enables a three year old to be discarded.

Harriet Klausner

These days, every police procedural on television follows the same pattern. A body is found in the "cold open," the police make a wisecrack or two, the opening titles roll, and the next scene starts in the morgue, with the cops bantering back and forth with the coroner about the cause of death. I think this began in the '70s, when Jack Klugman played a heroic coroner in "Quincy, M.E.," but it really started rolling back in 1991, when two of the top movies of the year --- Backdraft and The Silence of the Lambs --- featured extensive scenes in pathology labs, complete with horribly-mangled corpses. (In Backdraft, one sarcastic coroner advises the movie's hero to pick up a badly burned corpse, explaining, "It's not like he's going to try to sell you insurance.") Now you have entire shows in which the coroners and lab techs are the heroes, and the police are only on call to pick up the murderers that the investigators tell them to catch.

I watch programs like this myself, and the one thing that they mostly have in common is that the people standing over the body and talking aren't incredibly interested in the person who died. They are interested in the body, and the clues that it contains --- the elements of the final meal, the pattern of the cuts on the corpse's skin, the DNA under the fingernails --- but not so much about who the person on the slab was. For the coroner, the body is grist for the grisly mill; for the police, it's a necessary stop on the road to catching the criminal. But the whole exercise is not calculated to inspire pity, or regret, or any emotion that can't be expressed by the cheap one-liner. It's just the necessary work of exposition that will lead to some hapless guest star ensnared in the web of justice.

That is not what INVISIBLE BOY is about. Strictly speaking, it is more of a courtroom drama than a mystery. In a mystery, you are given an array of possible suspects and follow the detective to determine which of them killed the victim in the conservatory with the lead pipe, or what have you. It does not give much away to say that in this book, the perpetrators are not only identified, but identified swiftly and correctly --- there is none of this "did-they-didn't-they" business. The mystery, such as it is, revolves on whether or not they will escape justice.

Where INVISIBLE BOY diverges from your run-of-the-mill police procedural is its concern for, and focus on, its young victim. Cornelia Read's heroine, the intrepid, stylish and (sometimes) sozzled Madeline Dare, has returned from the hinterlands and is working at a dead-end publishing job in Manhattan. A chance acquaintance at a vodka-fueled party convinces her to assist in cleaning out generations of neglected brambles from a ruined, abandoned cemetery in deepest Queens. While wielding her machete through the thickets of the urban jungle, Madeline comes across the bones of a child --- not a child of generations past, but a boy of contemporary New York, whose ribs were shattered by the violent acts of an abuser.

The child's name is discovered quickly, and his mother and her boyfriend are arrested shortly thereafter. Madeline spends most of the rest of the novel observing the slow-moving gears of the criminal justice system. She's far from a passive participant; Read has her dealing with a shadowy threat to her own safety, and she must try to confront an instance of abuse from her own family's past. But most of the action takes place in court, with Madeline sitting at a remove, unable to do more than hope for justice.

INVISIBLE BOY tends to wander in places, although reading about Madeline wander through the Hamptons is more fun than watching most other people do anything else. But it always returns to those bones, to the life of the poor, abused child who died because he left a toy on the floor. It stands against our routine desensitization of the dead, against making their lives the fodder for a badly-creaking justice system. It does more than touch on the eternal themes of memory, regret, loss and death --- it incorporates them, making them live on the page.

In Read's previous novels, there was a moment when the scales fell from the narrator's eyes and a previously unsuspected character was revealed to be evil and dangerous. That doesn't happen in INVISIBLE BOY. The evil isn't discovered in a flash of inspiration, but is revealed, slowly and painfully, in the kind of stark language needed for the task. The book exists in a dark moral universe, a world away from the slickness of TV police procedurals, down in a place of sorrow and helplessness. It does not offer cheap entertainment, but wrenching emotion, the small comforts of pity, and a glimpse into the unsettling void.

I purchased this book because I read Ms. Read's prior novels and found them to be instantly and completely involving. Her heroine, Madeline Dare, attaches me like an immediate best friend, despite the fact that her background and mine have nothing in common. I could follow her from chapter to chapter just enjoying listening to her conversations with her husband, sister, and friends, which is what I did in "Invisible Boy". "Invisible Boy" takes place in 1990. Madeline and her husband Dean have finally left "upstate" and moved to Manhattan, sharing an apartment with Madeline's sister and friend. While helping a distant cousin clear weeds from an old graveyard, Madeline discovers a very recent skeleton, and the action proceeds from there.

As noted above, I enjoyed "Invisible Boy" purely for the privilege of following Madeline around. I did, however, find myself a bit disappointed with the story. The main plot line follows the search for the identity of the skeleton, which turns out to be that of a 3-year-old boy, and for the person(s) responsible for his death. But there are no surprises. The story develops more as a rumination on appalling behavior -- we "normal" and "civilized" people confronted with those who seem to lack all empathy. The secondary plot involves a friend from Madeline's teenage years, now also living in Manhattan. This plot line was intriguing, as the friend's behaviour became increasingly bizarre, but I found the resolution both puzzling and unsatisfying. Moreover, I don't understand how the author intended it to relate to the main story, unless in a broad sense of comparing the rich with the poor. (I hope a later reviewer enlightens me).

In sum, I recommend "Invisible Boy" as a pleasure to read. Hopefully, you will understand it at a deeper level than I did.

INVISIBLE BOY
Cornelia Read
Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-446-51134-6
$24.99 - Hardback
432 pages
Reviewer: Annie Slessman

If you read The Crazy School by Cornelia Read then you already know that Cornelia Read is a master storyteller. In INVISIBLE BOY, Cornelia takes Madeline Dare on a new adventure in New York City set in the early 1990's. Madeline, while helping friend, Cate, clean up a historical cemetery discovers the skeleton of a three year old boy whose chest is caved in from a brutal beating. This discovery leads her to a new friendship with a woman police officer and the rediscovery of an old college buddy.

Interwoven into this story is Madeline's strange friendship with her college friend, Astrid. Astrid, the beautiful, has just married Christoph who has offered Madeline's unemployed husband a position with his firm. Astrid's strange behavior takes on a new high after her marriage to Christoph and Madeline finds herself caught between her loyalty to her husband and her friendship with Astrid.

This is not a simple story. Rather it is one that is complex and thought provoking. Read combines the interesting elements in human nature, relationships and civic responsibility and threads them into one bracing novel. There is something for everyone in this work and I can understand why it was chosen for publication. Few writers today can weave such a complex story and yet, provide reading that will span age and educational barriers.

Cornelia Read lives is New Hampshire and can be visited on her website at [...].

This book is beautifully written, and it has an amazing range. Think Janet Evanovich for laugh-out-loud humor, Sarah Paretsky (only more nuanced, in my opinion) for social conscience, and Carol O'Connell for fabulous New York weirdness. The only reason for the four-star rating is I'm a tough grader and for whatever reason (possibly my own inattention) I wouldn't quite put this in the change-your-life realm, but it is lovely.

Cornelia Read had me hooked from the first lines of her new book, wherein she absolutely nails the New York City of two decades ago. Madeline Dare makes her third appearance here. Maddie is a former socialite whose mother had gone "from deb parties to the verge of food stamps, [her] father from the floor of the Stock Exchange to a VW camper behind the Chevron station in Malibu." She is now 27 years old, and after growing up in California and then living in upstate New York and the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, she and her husband of two years are living in Manhattan, where she works taking phone orders for books, having previously "worked as a teacher at a boarding school for disturbed kids and as a journalist for a couple of small newspapers," which readers will recognize as the settings in the first two books in the series.

Maddie and her husband share an apartment with her younger sister, Pagan ["Pague"], and a friend of many years, Sue. We are soon introduced to another boarding-school friend, Astrid, whose vagaries are difficult to fathom, by Maddie as well as the reader. They soon find out that Madeline's much-married [and divorced] mother is planning a Valentine's Day wedding to her newest beau. Those story lines are suddenly superseded by a much darker one, when Madeline discovers, among leaves and weeds in a small cemetery in Queens, the skeleton of what turns out to be a boy of about three years of age, the body apparently having been dumped there about six months previously. There is evidence that the boy was and had been the victim of severe abuse during his short lifetime. Madeline is one of the early witnesses in the ultimate trial of the accused killers.

The writing is by turn lyrical, funny as well as witty, and deeply moving. The chilling subtext throughout, that of child abuse and its implicit "destruction of trust," is handled with great empathy and, at the same time, necessary brutality. The vivid courtroom scenes are impossible to read without choking up, even before the closing arguments are made. And yet this reader was totally unprepared for the final pages. This is a beautifully written novel, one which will stay with me for a while, and it is highly recommended.

What a wonderfully written book. The characters are believable, unique, and interesting. The plot kept you wondering and wanting to turn the next page. I'm looking forward to her next book.

Cornelia Read is the sort of writer who makes me want more. I was eagerly looking forward to this, her third novel, and when it arrived I found myself reading Invisible Boy straight through in one night.
Madeline Dare is a sympathetic and believable character and the intertwined story lines advance the plot in a way that seems effortless and natural and is the hallmark of truly gifted craftsmanship.
Cornelia Read has created a fascinating story that explores the ties of family and love and damage, parents and children, friendship, marriage, and the moral imperative. Her message is as compelling as Vonnegut's, "God damn it babies, you've got to be kind".
This book is a knockout.

I just got into Cornelia Read's books after reading her posts on the Murderati mystery blog for a while, but once I got into Invisible Boy I could not put the darn thing down (same with its predecessors Field of Darkness and Crazy School). I won't rehash the plot here since there are many informative reviews, but I find Read funny, snappy, snarky and really truly entertaining. I pick up one of her books on a Saturday, there goes my weekend productivity...

This is the third book in the Madeline Dare series. The story is complex and some of the characters are so well written that it's hard to believe the author made them up. Some I didn't like at all, others I felt sorry for, a few grew on me and a couple had some pretty heavy potty mouths. There are many surprises in the book and one of the things I like the most are the stabs at humor. This is another thriller that has a side of weirdness to it. If you want something different in a thriller and don't mind the language, this would be a good choice.