Review: Coming of Age Novel (normal)
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 20, 2013
Book 1 encompassed the normal events of Alec's life.  At age thirteen Alec seemed to ignore reading and so his mother, Alicia, read to him.  His imagination took over and he would spin his own story.  His mother worried that it was Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, only he wasn't that active.  Alicia took it up with his father Alex Baldwin, Sr. who felt it had to do with raging hormones.  Whatever caught his attention, Alec became in his mental movies.  But Alec, regardless of his seeming inattention, was an excellent student.  Anything that caught his mind  caused him to research it thoroughly until he knew more than the books.  He was ten when he commenced having these visions.  As time passed, his visions became so real that he experiences his senses of feeling and smell, besides sight.Finally Alicia took him to a psychologist, Dr. Schmidthosen, whom Alec instantly disliked. Alicia was a beautiful, trim woman and attracted the doctor more than her son did.  Alicia noticed the doctor wasn't paying any attention to Alec's problem and left.  At age thirteen, Alex gave Alec a computer, and he traveled the world and the ages, withdrawing into himself as Alec had to experience his information as real and not as some detached fragment of history.One day Alec saw a beautiful girl in a mirror.  Later, he could hear her and she called herself Princess Sandra.  Alec became her knight, and whenever he was bored or needed answers to his questions, when he thought of her, she appeared.  They spent hours and hours philosophizing, and Sandra attempting to explain how she fit into Alec's life.  She said she was part of him and would always be there for him.The story continued with Alec struggling to make sense of what Sandra said; Alicia, having a talent for painting formed a painting club; and Alex, a good husband and provider , was rather dull and very aware of Alicia's attraction to other men.  Alec continued to mature, became enamored with a girl two years older than himself, and went through the usual stages of teen on-again, off-again.  Although the dialogues between Sandra and Alec were most thoughtful and far-reaching, still Alec had the usual ups and downs of becoming a man and his parents did also in their own right as a married couple.  I feel that parents of precocious teenagers will truly enjoy this story and perhaps become a little more enlightened as to how maturing children think.  I recommend this book and look forward to the next two books in this trilogy covering the paranormal and supernormal.