Her roommates are May, an Alzheimer patient and Elva, a blind, eighty-something lady with an agenda. Elva regrets that she and her late husband didn t ever have a chance to visit Italy. Remembering a childhood game she played with her sister, Elva suggests that they pretend to travel to Italy . . . She would figure out our route to our hotel on the little fold-out map and tell us exactly what famous buildings we were passing. . . . There s an old Star Trek episode in which Captain Christopher Pike enlists Spock s help in returning to a forbidden planet.
Pike is in a wheelchair, only able to make a light blink to say yes or no.
During the episode, it is revealed that on the forbidden planet lives a race of aliens who can take your thoughts and make them seem real. Like Courtney, Pike chooses to walk again, even if it s not real. The Italian setting allows Fleischman to pull in references to Renaissance art. He unabashedly uses the character of Elva to throw culture at the reader from poetry of Whittier or Whitman to descriptions of the architecture of the Pantheon. Like Courtney, the reader may become a bit impatient with this tedious preaching, but the transformation in Courtney keeps the reader s interest.