Truesight -- David Stahler Jr.

Tell me if this sounds at all familiar:

A boy lives in a utopia.  He starts to see things in a different way.  Slowly he realizes that it isn't a utopia at all.  He runs away.

Bwah!  Wrong.  It isn't The Giver.  It's Truesight. 

Jacob lives on Harmony Station, a colony on a planet far from Earth, where everyone is blind.  He starts getting crippling headaches, and slowly, he gains vision.  And he starts to see the hypocrisy that surrounds the colony.

It might not be fair to compare every single book about a dystopia to The Giver, but really, it's inevitable.  The author could have at least given Jacob a different name--Jacob and Jonas are a little too similar.  Unless he wanted the comparison to be made.  Or is there a Biblical story about a Jacob gaining vision that I don't know?  Or am I just trying too hard?

It isn't that Truesight is a bad book, but it doesn't stand up.  I don't think it'll last the way that The Giver has, either.  It'll have a short run of popularity (if that), and then fade away.

It was okay.  But if I had a choice between the two, I'd just re-read The Giver.  If a kid LOVED The Giver, I'd recommend it as a similar read.  Or if a kid LOVED sci-fi, I'd recommend it as a last resort.  But probably only in those two cases.

Comments

Yuck.

[leila]

Yeah. It's turning out to be one of those books that you hate more and more as time goes by. The name similarity hadn't even occured to me until I was writing it up. I'm starting to think that he WANTED it to be compared to The Giver.