Publishers Weekly
Smith's novel of the painfully ordinary son of a brilliant scientist, and his sudden acquisition of marvelous powers of memory, is read by Garcia with a taste for melodrama. Garcia's melodramatic streak is understated, prodded less by emoting than by tone of voice and careful pauses. Each sentence ends with a slight downturn, as if inflated hopes have rapidly dwindled to nothingness. Garcia, a stage actor by training, treats Smith's novel as an extended monologue to be performed, summoning the moods and sensations of its prose via subtle shifts of emphasis. The result is a performance-driven audiobook, rendered in minimalist fashion. Simultaneous release with the Atria hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 23). (July)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
Young Nathan may be extremely talented, whiling away his summers in whiz-kid camps, but he's not the prodigy his father dreams of until he emerges from an accident-induced coma with a rare condition that lets him memorize...everything. With a five-city tour; a BookClubReader feature. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
He's no genius, but he's hardly normal; a boy struggles with this quandary in this finely modulated second novel (The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, 2006). Nathan Nelson is an only child burdened by expectations of genius. The problem is not his high-minded but practical mother; it's his father Samuel, a college physics professor in their Wisconsin town. Samuel has large ambitions of his own (he is looking for the ghost particle), but he takes Nathan's mild precocity for genius. He subjects him to frequent math and science drills. For his tenth birthday in 1980, Samuel plans a surprise trip to California. Disneyland, hopes Nathan, but no such luck; they visit Samuel's shrine, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The fact is Samuel, while trying to do the best by his son, is clueless about kids and has no people skills. A crisis erupts at the seventh-grade science fair when Nathan, seeing the rest of his childhood gobbled up by similarly dreary events, deliberately flubs the championship question and gains a respite. This is where an interesting novel becomes even more so. Nathan's grandfather, drunk, causes a deadly highway accident. The old man dies; after a brief near-death experience, Nathan emerges from a coma to find he has synesthesia-some sensory boundaries have dissolved; words have colors and tastes; he can perform astonishing feats of memory; his father's hopes of genius surge back. Nathan attends an Institute for the unusually gifted, but again he disappoints his dad, who will soon learn he has an inoperable brain tumor. There are moving scenes before and after his death as Nathan realizes that behind his difficult exterior, Samuel did harbor unconditional love for him. Thereare also plenty of lighter moments, and the unerringly true dialogue is a delight; one dinner-table conversation of a "normal" family, eavesdropped on by Nathan, deserves to be anthologized. A luminous addition to novels about fathers and sons.
DEC 07/JAN 08 - AudioFile
In this eccentric coming-of-age story, Paul Michael Garcia's task is to make Nathan Nelson, whose father can't accept the fact that his son is not extraordinary, feel like a real, sympathetic, age-appropriate boy. Nathan's father is an almost brilliant physicist who lives in a very odd, very isolated mental universe. When at age 17 Nathan is nearly killed in a car crash, he develops a phenomenal memory plus synesthesia. His father sends him off to be studied at a research institute, which is filled with a cast of gifted oddballs whom Garcia expertly portrays. But overall Garcia’s performance is somewhat gray and uninflected, as if nothing that happens to Nathan strikes Garcia as exciting or funny. It's fine, but curiously flat. B.G. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
