Invisible Touch ~ Kelly Parra

Invisible Touch
MTV Books/Pocket Books
(October 14, 2008)
288 pages
$9.95
Amazon


Eleven years ago, an accident killed seventeen-year-old Kara Martinez's father. An accident that caused her to die for eleven minutes and changed her life for ever. Her mother has halted anything that has to do with their father--no more religious idols, no more Mexican food and a happy, compliant acting Kara dressed in pink clothes her mother lays out on her pillow.

Only that's not the real Kara. The real Kara wears black and does her own set of laundry in secret and hates pink. And keeps a secret blog: The Sign-Seer because that accident eleven years ago did one other thing, it gave Kara the ability to see the future in a way. She sees little flashes of a persons fate and it's up to her to piece together the puzzle in time to save them.

The story follows Kara's journey to solve one main puzzle: what it means when she sees a gun flash on a classmate's chest. Of course, life continues to go on around her complicating thing to the nth. There's her mother who wants everything to be picture, suburban perfect forcing Kara to watch her every move; her older brother who is hardly ever home. Then there's her new boyfriend Anthony...who just might be perfect except that her brother's convinced he's a gangbanger so she's not allowed to see him.

Invisible Touch had great amounts of detail thrown in (from what Kara's best friend Danielle was wearing to the routine her mother had every day) but not the kind that it ever became tedious. The characters all had their own little side stories (and were their own people) but it was never slapping you in the face or overpowering/distracting, just complimentary.

There were a lot of issues addressed or at least raised in this book (from Anthony being from the 'wrong side of town' and both he and Kara getting trouble for it to dealing with grief) but not in a PSA way.

I also loved the way this book ended. After just reading a book that was billed so heavily as a mystery and, in the end, just told me what happened, I really enjoyed the way this book pulled everything together. In the same way that Kara figures things out because she pieces things together, things from all over the story were put together to solve the puzzle/end the book. And there was another thing explained as well that made perfect sense, too. This was an example of a book that makes you think back on other parts of the book and say Oh, so that's why that happened that way!

10/10

Invisible Touch isn't technically out until October 14th but I think some places (like Amazon) are already selling it...so go buy it! ...Seriously, do!

and thank you to Stephanie Kuehnert for having an awesome contest I could win to win this book :)