Trick of the Eye - Hardcover

Dennis Haseley is a teacher, author, community organzier, and a professional fund raiser. Some of his titles are The Invisible Moose, The Soap Bandit, The Kite Flier, Photographer Mole and The Amazing Thinking Machine.. 

Grade 7-9-Richard talks to the characters in paintings; they respond. They seem to be telling him that he has forgotten something important in his past. Confused and friendless, the boy lives with his mother, who has told him that his father drowned in a shipwreck. A tutor teaches him at home, but he can't remember why he has been sent away from school. Second-rate, slightly altered copies of famous paintings are being stolen from galleries in his city, and they become clues for Richard. For most of this novel, readers wonder if they are reading about the descent into madness of a bewildered and disturbed boy. It is only in the last dozen or so pages that the story becomes somewhat clearer. Readers learn that nine years ago, when Richard was three, he spied on his uncle, a painter for whom Richard's mother, Annabel, was modeling and with whom she was having an affair. When she tells him that she is involved with another man, the painter murders her and Richard witnesses the crime. His aunt, Annabel's sister, ships her husband off to a mental institution and raises the boy as her own. Richard realizes that his aunt has loved him, and is ready to go back to school and get on with his life. Minimally drawn characters and a weak plot that is puzzling and ambiguous give this brooding tale limited appeal. There is an impressionistic, surreal quality to the novel that makes it difficult to read.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME
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