Sevens: Week 1: Shattered

The first hundred or so pages deal with Meena, Jeremy and Peter.

The novel opens with Peter Davis having a nightmare. He dreams of six ten-year-old children, Meena, Jeremy, Danny, Jane, Karyn and Reed. They are asking for his help. In reality, he's in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. (Peter is a child of an inter-racial couple)

Meena is an adopted Vietnamese child. Meanwhile some students are going to a party, and one of them, Mike, makes a homophobic remark about another football team's mascot.

We find out the accident was about a month previous to the story. The accident was due to a drunk driver. Meena is at a party and keeps thinking about something that happened with a boy.

She's attracted to a boy named Justin, but as he starts to kiss her she gets sick. Later, she's at a couple's house and it turns out she had kissed the woman's husband. That night he comes home early and rapes her (or just has sex with her, but it wasn't actually rape).

Meena is suffering from major guilt complex thinking. Peter is having major problems dealing with being in a wheelchair and imagining what people are thinking about him.

Some hundred pages into the book another character, Danny, is brought up. He is seeking a psychiatrist and is on medication.

Meena is babysitting again when a cord malfunctions and a major fire starts. She gets the young child out before he can be hurt. The house is next door to where Peter lives.

There's a reference made to something that happened when Meena was ten, and a number of children being questioned.

Jane was mentioned briefly earlier, and again later in the book. She's very intense in her studies, and helps wheel Peter between classes (he's in a wheelchair.)

Then the worst news of all arrives. The guy who raped Meena, and his wife, are going to be staying with Meena and her family until their house is fixed.

Jeremy is revealed to be gay. Peter is still thinking about some kind of “atrocity” he committed seven years earlier. There's also a reference made to his having a gun at the time.

Meena decides the only thing she can do is run away. Before she does that, she says that she started the fire, even though she didn't.

An interesting book with a lot of people who are having major emotional problems, and a whole lot of unanswered questions. There's still six more books to go in the series, though.

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