Download And Enjoy The Seeing Envisioned By Diana Hendry Shared As Audiobook

was a short, chilling and atmospheric read which I enjoyed,

The thing I enjoyed most about this book was the historical backdrop it is set in, It's set in post war Britain which is a fascinating world to read about, The country is changing as people are demanding more after having to experience total war and the demands that experience put on the population whether they were part of the armed forces or not.
For some living in this new world means finally having all those things they couldn't have before and saw the explosion of the cosumer market whilst others still lived in poverty.
I liked seeing the contrast between the families of the two girls at either end of this scale and seeing how their world views differed because of this.


The book also builds up a sense of paranoia, You are never quite sure whether or not Philip's abilities are real or not and the way in which he and his sister hunt out old Nazis is creepy.
It shows you how the actions of a few can make life very difficult for outsiders and also leaves you with a seed of doubt in your mind to whether these people are as innocent as they say they are or whether it is just postwar hysteria.


The ending of the book was the most unsettling for me, The story goes very dark and wasn't at all what I expected from the book which was quite nice in someways as I hadn't second guessed what might happen and was therefore surprised.


All in all a unique and interesting read, When I end a book in tears it generally gets a high rating,

I perceive this novel to be about perception, The seeing is how people see things, The main characters are all damaged in some way and all lost something during World War, It deals with paranoia and on a minor scale propaganda, One of the characters shows an almost fascist like determination to manipulate other characters and get them to be against other characters,

It also deals with a victim of child abuse without going into detail, It deals with survivor's guilt as well as touching on the class divide in's England, For a short book it has a lot of content and I enjoyed reading it all, Parallels are easily drawn when someone is discriminating against people who are 'different' too, The manipulation of a character to seem to be psychic has happened a lot as well throughout the years,

I started this book expecting a paranormal experience and I was happy that it turned out to be a human experience instead, Astar recommendation. I couldn't feel angry at Natalie or that it was her fault, What a terrible start to her life and her brother's, But should Lizzie have been able to 'see' what was wrong and do something Will ponder for a while on that,
Very well written, liked seeing the various characters' views of each other, Because how can evil just stop

The novel opens with a prologue that introduces us to Lizzie she is dreaming and is evidently distressed, and we know that something upsetting has happened.
Then we are taken back to when she first met Natalie and her brother Philip, Wellbehaved thirteenyearold Lizzie is immediately drawn to the much wilder Natalie when she entered the classroom for the first time,

I looked at her and she reached to my heart, She went straight there, as if there was something in her that was in me too, only I hadnt known it before and though I didnt know what it was, I knew it was important.
I wanted her for my friend like Id never wanted anything before,

Soon Lizzie is spending much of her time with her, she feels they are kindred spirits and she has left behind her former best friends Alice and Dottie, becoming more adventurous and venturing off the beaten track as her mother calls it.
There is a contrast in their home lives whilst Lizzies family is proud to be moving up in the world, Natalies home life seems unsettled and somewhat impoverished.
Its the mids and thoughts of World War II still occupy both Lizzie and Natalies minds, Natalie then reveals to Lizzie that Philip has a strange gift, an ability to see, and she is convinced that he can identify leftover Nazis from the war who are living amongst them, perhaps waiting to strike, and she believes that together the three of them can be the ones to rid the place of these people, of the evil that still lives on.
She seems driven in this by the fact that her father died in the war, What starts as an exciting plan to Lizzie soon becomes something much more terrible,

We also learn of an artist who has visited Norton, the small seaside town which is the setting of the novel, for several years, setting up in his yellow caravan and painting, hoping to forget the painful wartime memories he carries with him.
The story has a main firstperson narrative from Lizzies point of view, but also features letters from the painter, Hugo, to his sister, and then it also includes extracts from Natalies diary, so we are able to look at events from several different perspectives and gain insight into their backgrounds.
I felt Lizzie was a little naïve to be drawn so easily into Natalies ways but its quite possible that in her innocence she would have just been so taken with her, so intrigued by her and by this powerful new friendship that she was caught up in the situation.


I dont think Ive read much fiction before that has looked at the impact and legacy of the effects of war specifically on children, so this is a clever approach for the author to take, and shes not afraid to explore dark, disturbing thoughts and feelings that the children may have had about the war.
This is a wellpaced, inventive, dark and mysterious historical tale for young adult readers and Id certainly say its strong and powerful enough for adults too I found it fascinating, compelling, unsettling and sad, and the cover image is fittingly rather haunting too.

I just finished reading it and wow!
It was one of those very rare moments when you pick up a because the cover grabs your attention.
The you read the synopsis, And finally the storey takes hold of you to the point where you don't want to put it down,

Not usually my kind of Nobel but I truly recommend this book to all readers,

Beautifully written and captures the true thoughts and essence of youth and friendship, Absolutely adore this book, I couldn't out it down, Was the horror of the concentration camps in the very air they breathed, . . It's as if the memory of war has wounded them, Hurt their hearts, their minds, Their spirits. '
Short and far from sweet, 'The Seeing' is a sparse, terse tail of how the war has damaged the minds of three children, though two were only babies when it ended and one born years later.
Set in a small seaside town in: World Warhas been over for eleven years but its legacy lingers in returning soldiers fathers and brothers and boyfriends, and the bomb sites and bombed out buildings found in every town even decades after the war ended.
Air raid shelters are still around, ideal dens for kids to play in and the legacy, the memory of the war is everywhere: in comics, at the cinema, in the stories told by parents and older siblings, in the tales told of fathers who did not return.

The war has painted a peculiarly intense mural in Natalies head, Her father died at Colditz she says but did he It seems rather romantic it feels like something made up, I suspect Natalies father had used the war to do a runner from his harridan wife, Natalies mother is a prostitute another legacy of the war, perhaps, Natalies homelife is squalid, there is never any food or comfort there, Natalie hates the uncles who hammer on her door and tell her shes next, She wraps herself in a secret fantasy life, draping the room she shares with her brother with blankets and rags like something from an AliBaba tale, She hides in the excitement of her minddamaged brother Philips visions and trances, Philip screams when he sees leftover Nazis, 'the swastikas on their hearts', It gives Natalies life purpose to root the secret Nazis out, because 'how can evil just stop',
The tragedy plays out in the voices of the children and Hugo, an artist, friend of Philip and Lizzie, but the main voice is Lizzies, Lizzie still feels the war too, but in a very different way from Natalie, Lizzies home is comfortably suburban money and food are abundant, the carpets are deep, the curtains thick velvet, and all cloaked in a stifling bourgeois respectability that Lizzie craves escape from.
Lizzies mother is Jewish Lizzie is well aware that if the Germans had won the war, they would have been packed off to the concentration camp but she still hates the peace and yearns for the excitement of wartime.
Both girls are looking or escape, for excitement, and when Natalie arrives at Lizzies school, like the wild west wind of Shelleys poem, Lizzie is thrilled when she is chosen by the glamorous outsider as her special friend, 'kindred spirits forever'.


Together, the girls and Philip embark on a summer of driving out the leftover Nazis until it all goes inevitably wrong
And this is where the book begins to show that it is meant as a childrens book something I didnt know when I picked it up, fortunately I would never have read it if I had realised that because the trajectory of the tale becomes suddenly very predictable everything is telegraphed in Philips visions and Natalies musings.
I knew exactly where it was going to go and how it was going to end, but the interest is all in the telling, The journey into the heads of these bored childadolescents is perfectly done, What they do, how they think, how they build excitement from the mesh of reality and fantasy, making their stories real it was very much like what I and my tight band of friends used to do when we went hunting for ghosts in old buildings and the graves of missing children on halfwooded demolition sites.
Though less extreme and far less cruel than what Natalie and Lizzie get up to, the essence of those long, hot childhood summers in the days before daytime TV, when children were meant to spend their days outdoors, felt incredibly real, perfectly pitched and told in refreshingly few words.

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