David: Book 3 (The Unseen)
Johnny Worthen
Jollyfish Press
August 2016
Reviewed by Michael R. Collings
David: Book 3 (The Unseen) provides a stirring capstone to Johnny Worthen’s Eleanor: The Unseen (2014) and Celeste: Book 2 (The Unseen) (2015), already acknowledged as powerfully written explorations of appearance and reality, personal identity and social inclusion, adolescence and adulthood, loyalty and betrayal…and any number of other dichotomies faced by young adults.
David picks up where Celeste concluded, with Eleanor Anders apparently dead, David and Wendy Venn injured physically or psychologically, Jim Venn dead, and the hunt still on, led by a fanatic scientist who is convinced that the shapeshifter—in whatever body and under whatever name—is still alive.
While ‘David’ as character plays a relatively minor role in the first half of the book, he is the overall center-piece of the narrative, both as the object of Eleanor’s quest for love and stability and as the government’s primary link to Eleanor. He is at once the greatest danger to her survival and her only hope for stability and meaning in a life that has become increasingly complex as circumstances demand change after change—body after body—for Eleanor. By the end, he is not only fully present but also provides the only means to secure her freedom, her future, and, in more ways than one, her salvation. In a situation in which she must kill or be killed, he offers the sole alternative.
The convolutions of the plot widen to include Eleanor and the Venn family as well as most of Eleanor’s friends—and sometime enemies—from high school and all of the inhabitants of Jamesford, Wyoming, and the local tribal reservation. Each ripple outward requires that Eleanor take on new flesh, and each change demands more and more of her, putting her core identities at risk of being overwritten and forgotten.
Worthen meticulously maneuvers Eleanor and her defenders through increasingly perilous situations, including the dangerous tasks of unmasking the evil that is the Revealers; penetrating the secrets of a mysterious research site defended by agents of Homeland Security and the FBI; and arranging affairs to protect David and his family and friends. To accomplish these and more, Worthen goes into greater and greater detail in describing Eleanor’s transformations, gruesome and bloody as they are, and the elemental hungers that she must face and allay with each.
As always, Worthen’s writing is spot-on. Essential backstory appears as needed, neatly woven into the narrative or presented as sub-narrative itself. New and old character are strong enough in David to satisfy even readers who haven’t yet encountered Eleanor or Celeste. And as the conclusion to an extended adventure in shapeshifting and solidity, it is perfect.
