Fact or Fantasy

Let me confess right now that I've stolen this image. I hope Isobelle Carmody doesn't mind because I'm about to rave about her latest book, Alyzon Whitestarr.

Written as a young adult novel that story, which I can barely put down long enough to write this, is about a young girl who discovers her supersenses after an accident.

(Why does it always have to be an accident or illness that uncovers these things? Why can wanting it be enough. Oh I know. The alternative would be hard work to uncover them - just like all thing worthwhile.)

In any case her newly enhanced sense of smell, for instance, can detect the different moods, thoughts and attentions of the people around her. Realistically overwhelming at first. Her other senses are also supremely altered.

This is not the first time this idea has been presented and it's not always in fiction. Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under accounts the journey she took with Australian aborigines and discovered many innate human abilities. Mind you the walkabout was no cake walk.

Roald Dahl writes in The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar

“All of us, you see, have two senses of sight, just as we have two senses of smell and taste and hearing. There is the outer sense, the highly developed one which we all use, and there is the inner one also. If only we could develop these inner senses of ours, then we could smell without our noses, tast without out tongues, hear without our ears and see without our eyes."