Invisible

Dougie isn't taking his meds like he should as he continues to feverishly work on his model train town, constructed almost completely on matches. Dougie is beyond troubled, and Norm Lee's performance of an obsessive teen in deep levels of delusion is nothing short of amazing. Lee gives Dougie's "logical" explanations an aggressive edge that indicates someone hostile. Lee also conveys hints about how others view Dougie even when Dougie can't recognize their perception of him. Lee does an admirable job portraying Dougie's therapist, complete with smoker's voice, and Dougie's father, who sounds a bit mentally ill himself. Through Lee's narration, listeners will quickly become aware that Dougie's life is not how he tells it and will hang on every word they hear. J.M.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

Starred review from June 27, 2005
The strength of Hautman's (Godless
) painfully sad novel is the wisecracking but clearly unreliable voice of its narrator, 17-year-old Douglas MacArthur Hanson who admits, "I'm not only disturbed, I'm obsessed." One of his passions is "Madham," a town he's building for his model railroad, complete with a 1:800 scale replica of the Golden Gate Bridge. He's also fixated on a pretty girl who clearly wants nothing to do with him. And he's overly reliant on his only friend, Andy Morrow, a fellow junior who is the popular and outgoing yang to Dougie's outcast and introverted yin. Hautman expertly teases out the truth about a tragic incident that occurred "at the Tuttle place" three years earlier, a mystery that propels the story to its horrific conclusion. Dougie is as mathematically gifted and socially inept as the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, but he also has a sophisticated wit. During a lapse in conversation at one of his $95-an-hour therapy sessions, he observes, "We stare at each other for about $1.40." His self-deprecating comments and wry observations make his spiral into self-destruction all the more heartbreaking. (One measure of how sympathetically the author has portrayed him is that even though he stalks a classmate, you root for him to get away with it.) Hautman once again proves his keen ability for characterization and for building suspense. Ages 12-up.