In the Blink of an Eye is written probably for the Young Adult market as Eade’s tend to be. I say probably because it is absolutely fascinating, and page turning, so much so that I couldn’t put it down, and … let me break it to you, am not a young adult, though I might look just out of my teens. Now, now, none of that from my readers.
This book is also that off putting word, ‘educational’. But it is so deftly written by the Eade duo that facts and discoveries merge effortlessly into young Larry’s struggle to survive – er – survive what? I hear you ask. Read on.
Larry, an Edinburgh schoolboy, defies his doctor father, during COVID-19 lockdown, to meet with friends in the Meadows, but abandons them on seeing Skye, a girl in the year below him with whom he has been in love ever since she sang a solo at a school concert two years previously.
Engineered by Larry’s doting sister, Angie, their young love seems to blossom until Skye is taken away to Stornoway by her single mother and forbidden to contact Larry. Devastated, Larry then goes down with COVID-19 and ends up on a ventilator where his life hangs in the balance. However this is not time wasted, for, whilst, disconnected from his body, he relives past lives – not one, or two, but lives lived over the space of seven thousand years.
Oliver Read told Frost Magazine ‘Whenever I returned from a fortnight’s vacation, whilst working as a consultant hospital physician, I would avidly scan the latest medical journals to see what advances or breakthroughs had occurred during my absence. To write something that encompasses every major medical advance during the past seven thousand years would make Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ seem, in comparison, like a Hemingway six-word story. I have therefore chosen only some of the inspired (and inspiring) characters who have played a role in helping humankind, over millennia, tackle the legion of diseases confronting us.’
These stories all relate to major advances in the history of medicine, from the trephining of skulls (drilling holes in the head) seven thousand years ago to the recent discovery of CRISPR technology to remove harmful genes which, when Larry recovers, and he meets up again with Skye, might provide a solution to the true reason for her mother’s decision to separate the young lovers: a genetic condition which was the reason Skye’s musician father abandoned her and her mother.
There is pace and empathy in In the Blink of an Eye as the love story weaves in and out of the a past highlighting such breakthroughs, changing medicine forever. Eade gives resonance to the history with his own, often moving, experiences as a hospital doctor.
This novel is accessible for absolutely all ages. A page turning scenario of endeavour, intelligence and life affirming skills in the truest sense of the word.
Bravo! Oliver and Lucia Eade. We must all read, learn. And bless the saints that be, that we are where we are today in the medical world, thanks to those that came before.
In the Blink of an eye is available in kindle and paperback.
