Blind main characters

[shanaqui]

Can anyone recommend me books with blind main (or at least significant) characters? I think I know of one-and-a-half: Stephen Lawhead's Paradise War trilogy has Tegid, and in Ursula Le Guin's Gifts, Orrec is voluntarily and temporarily "blinded". I'd prefer books where the blindness isn't magically hand-waved away: it's real, and it gets in the way, and the protagonist learns to deal with it. I don't mind about being born blind, being blinded by violence or illness, or slowly going blind with age.

Comments

[kyriacarlisle]

Emily Gregory, in Madeleine L'Engle's The Young Unicorns (warning: wikipedia entry=spoilers), is a teenaged pianist blinded in a robbery-gone-wrong. The book's a thriller, kind of, set in and around the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in NYC, but it's also full of L'Engle's characteristic concern with family life. It's the 3rd book in the Austen family series, but I read it before any of the others, and I wasn't lost.

It *does* have a very late-1960s view of Drugs And The Decay Of Urban Society, but it's still rather an innocent book. There's a lot of music written into it, and I really liked that.

[shanaqui]

Thank you! I've been meaning to read something by Madeleine L'Engle someday, maybe this'll be what I choose.

[kyriacarlisle]

I'll admit that although a lot of L'Engle's books make me think, "Come on! Is anybody's family really this nice?!?" that might be me, not her - and in an odd way, I value them more for that.

And I feel a little silly suggesting this, but if you're including Greek tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus?

[shanaqui]

I hadn't thought about plays -- I've read that one! Hee.