Invisible Woman by Elizabeth Kingsbury is a new take on the invisible man.

How many of us have said we would like to be invisible at one time or another?  Many of us have wondered about what it would be like to be hidden from everyone else and Elizabeth Kingsbury has taken it one step further in her novel.

Josie Everett became invisible in 1961 and soon found that it did not make things easier for her…far from it in fact.

Joseph Thomas Everett (Josie – who is female by the way) is a university secretary who is also an aspiring writer.  Unable to resist the temptation Josie sneaks into her fiancé Larry’s lab and uses his invisibility ray on herself.

On leaving the lab and going home she pretends to be a ghost and it all appears to be a rather good joke.  It is not long before her building is believed to be haunted.

On going out into the town with her new invisibility she soon encounters her first problem. How do you buy things like food when you can’t be seen?  Josie adopts the “five-fingered discount” and reflects on whether the Ten Commandments apply to those who are invisible.

Meanwhile it does not take long for Larry to figure out that it was Josie who broke into the lab and he quickly sees her as just using him to get something out of him.  Josie meanwhile would not appear to be too broken up about this as she does not appear to have had any great feeling for him anyway and had felt trapped by their impending marriage.

Josie continues to have fun with her new freedom but things become more complicated as she wonders how to get medical assistance when she cannot be seen.  After all an invisible burn hurts just as much as one that can be seen, but how to treat it?

Or worse still, how do you treat a gunshot wound when your fiancé is trying to shoot you?

As a take on the problems of someone becoming invisible this book is original, amusing and at times causes the reader to stop and think about just what it would be like to have the problem of being invisible.

However as a romance novel this is not particularly good.  The main problem is that although the description on the back of the book questions whether a man can fall in love with a woman who is permanently invisible Josie and Victor do not even meet until 10 pages before the end of the book.  There is no deep questioning of their relationship and the problems they would encounter due to Josie’s dilemma, they merely meet, fall in love and that is it.

I feel that the book would have been much better if it was long enough to cover their relationship in much more detail.  The end of the novel could not have taken place as it did without Josie and Victor meeting but on reading the back of the novel I was expecting more of a story between the two of them than there was.

For those like me who read a wide variety of books it is well worth reading but if you are a die-hard romance reader then you will probably find that this book is not for you.
 

RATING : As a paranormal novel this gets 
As a romance however it gets 
(if you need an explanation of the hearts ratings see my homepage)

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Also by Elizabeth Kingsbury: Jan of Cleveland

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