Gray Matter
-
-
4.8 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Rachel Whitman has everything. She's young, attractive, and affluent. Her husband is the brilliant CEO of his own company. They have a big new house in a flossy Boston suburb. They have all the brand-name "toys" that go along with wealth. And they have a gorgeous, sweet little six-year-old son named Dylan.
But Dylan has learning disabilities. Although intelligence isn't everything, Rachel lives in a community where the rewards for brainpower are conspicuous. She fears her son will grow up never fully appreciating the wonders of life. Like so many middle-class parents who would do anything to improve life for their children—whether it means fixing hair, teeth, or nose—Rachel cannot accept that her child is less than perfect.
Tortured by the idea that something she did in the past caused Dylan's problems, Rachel becomes obsessed with a secret and expensive medical procedure that claims to turn slow children into geniuses.
Should she and her husband sacrifice their new fortune on the risky, experimental procedure for the sake of their son's happiness? Unaware of the real consequences of the brain enhancement procedure, Rachel can't know that the costs of the operation go far beyond financial ones.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Visceral chills enliven the otherwise predictable path of Braver's second scientific thriller (after Elixir). Uber-yuppie Rachel Whitman worries about the teasing her slow-witted six-year-old son Dylan suffers at the hands of his brilliant playmate Lucinda at the fancy Massachusetts North Shore day care center he attends; worse, she fears that her college drug experimentation caused Dylan's deficiency. Seeing Rachel's distress, Lucinda's mother, Sheila, confides that Lucinda was much like Dylan until she was treated by Dr. Lucius Malenko at his exclusive Nova Children's Center to medically enhance her intelligence. Malenko's other patients include young Julian Watts, who works hours on end making exquisite pointillist paintings and has ground his teeth to nubs; Brendan LaMotte, who has a computer-like memory and deep emotional problems (he fantasizes about killing his grandfather); and Nicole DaFoe, who's sleeping with her history teacher and sabotages her academic rival to secure an important scholarship. Meanwhile, dogged police detective Greg Zakarian obsessively pores over the long-unsolved death of an unidentified little boy, even as another boy is abducted. This convoluted yarn works best when Braver keeps all his storylines in play, but as the plot unfolds, he focuses mostly on Rachel, whose worries about her son's failure to over-achieve make her the most conventional and perhaps least compelling of his characters. Still, he paints a rich tableau of creepy medical details and middle-class status anxiety and pulls off an explosive finale.
