What Is Visible is the fictionalized story of Laura Bridgman, a real-life deaf and blind woman whose successful education inspired Helen Keller's parents to seek the same for their daughter. Laura's limitations are severe but her immediate world includes some of the most celebrated figures her era--a tension debut novelist Kimberly Elkins maintains perfectly, lifting this book above documentary fiction into a fully realized work of the imagination.
Robbed by scarlet fever of sight, hearing, taste and smell at age two, seven-year-old Laura is sent to Boston's Perkins School for the Blind--the first deaf-blind child ever to receive an education. She communicates with letters fingered into others' palms. She becomes intensely attached to the school's founder, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, until his marriage to Julia Ward forces them apart. Laura is willful and precocious; as the school's star student, she's paraded in front of Dickens and Twain, endlessly on display as an example of the school's accomplishments.
Laura's heroes are flawed: Dr. Howe is charismatic but has his era's limited ideas about women and forbids his young wife from writing poetry. Despite her progressive views, Julia Ward Howe is repulsed by the school's blind girls. Laura herself--lacking most of her senses, lonely despite her fame, keenly interested in the world--touches the girls around her with an intensity that frightens them. She is willful and jealous, demanding endless affection and affirmation. In What Is Visible, where a vibrant world is filtered through Laura's singular mind, Elkins has created a complex, lively, engaging guide, brimming with a universal longing for connection and love. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer