Books - "Nobody" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The January 2013 novel, "Nobody," by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, is a curious combination of young love and science fiction. 

Claire, just out of her freshman year, has grown up practically alone, constantly ignored, and always forgotten, even by her own parents.  She has almost moved the world trying to be nice, working to be sweet, but it never helps. No matter what she does, she is overlooked.  She has lived almost all of her life in imaginary situations, creating scenarios of potential interaction with other people, but they never happen. No on hears her.  No one sees her.  No one cares.

Nix, now seventeen, was raised as a lab experiment by "the Society."  Trained and brainwashed from birth, he exists for one purpose, to kill the "nulls," the homicidal psychopaths, pointed out to him by the society.  He is extremely qualified for this job, but barely literate, and cared for by no one.  He is so overlooked by the entire world that he can "fade," allowing him to walk through walls and be invisible to everyone.

Told from the alternating point of view of these two characters, this book explores the possible situation that occurs when these two "nobodies" finally find each other, and realize that there actually is another person in the world who can see me, and touch me, and care for me.  The result is explosive.

Inspiration for this book might easily have come from the Season 1 "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode "Out of Sight. Out of Mind." In it, a young girl is ignored in school to the point where she literally becomes invisible (and goes kind of crazy).  Eventually, she is taken in for training as a spy or assassin by some group like the CIA.

And inspiration for this "love-at-first-glance" plot may have come from that of "Romeo and Juliette."  They jump into a situation which should have killed them both.  But in this case, the two of them survive to live happily ever after.

And inspiration for this "do-I-really-matter" theme could have come from Disney's made-for-TV movie "Lemonade Mouth."  The movie was aired two years before the book, "Nobody," was published.  Echoes of lines from the movie occur in this book.  Also, this book says: "Frozenlemonade. ... Claire's password of choice" when frozen lemonade was the beverage of choice for all the downtrodden, invisible students in the book "Lemonade Mouth," by Mark Peter Hughes.  In the movie (12:50) Olivia, hiding in the janitor's closet, reads aloud, "I'm nobody.  Who are you?  Are you nobody too?"  And wryly answers the question, "Huh.  Well, that would be a yes."  JLB quotes that line from Emily Dickinson on the first page, before the prologue.

However —
Just because you have found the one person in all the world who can actually see you, does not mean it is a good idea to give yourself to him.  If the whole world were face-blind, but you found one other person who could recognize you, it does not make that person good.  I loved the line in this book: "If there was one thing Claire knew like the back of her own hand, it was the edge of the abyss, and Nix was wearing darkness like sunscreen. SPF 70, slathered thick."  But in the end (or middle), Claire cannot resist the urge to "fix" Nix.  And through the magic of artistic license, it works out okay.  In real life, not so much.

Huh? moments —
1. How old is Claire?  The flyleaf says she's sixteen, but page 3 says: "the first day of her fifteenth summer," which would make her fourteen years old.  But the book later says she is older than Nix was (14) when he killed his first null.  Page 322 says "she was fifteen."
2. Upload/Download.  Having worked on an IBM mainframe computer for over 30 years, I can tell you that data is "uploaded" to the larger repository, usually a mainframe or the internet, and data is "downloaded" to the smaller repository, a smaller computer or disk.  The largest pile of data is the mountain, and the mountain does not come to Mohamed.  Data rolls down the mountain, unless it is pushed or pulled up the mountain.  From a mainframe, I would "download" (not "upload") data to my PC and then "download" (not "upload") it to a flash drive.  Pages 326 and 327 incorrectly use the word "upload", twice, to refer to moving data down the mountain to an external drive.

I have read and enjoyed this book, "Nobody," several times.  I later picked up a different book from the library, and within four pages, the author had waffled back and forth from past tense to present tense, changed points of view by the paragraph, and even inserted the author's own point of view.  I gave up that book and went back and reread "Nobody."  It is a real pleasure to read a book that is well written, and Jennifer Lynn Barnes does an excellent job of spinning a very readable story.