Saccades (): fast movement of an eye, head or other part of an animal's body or device. It can also be a fast shift in frequency of an emitted signal or other quick change. Humans and other animals do not look at a scene in a steady way. Instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental-map- corresponding to the scene. - dictionary.com

Saccades is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Thea Denny, who lives in an unnamed town in upstate New York, about three hours north of New York City. She's in tenth grade, a high school sophomore who lives with her mother in a small two-bedroom apartment, and though their relationship is often strained by financial difficulties, most of their problems are due to the fact that Thea is fifteen, and her mother is her mother. As for her father, Thea hasn't spoken to the man in several years, since her parents divorced. He's not in the picture, literally, because Thea cut him out of all their family photos, after he left her mother for another woman. So that's her home and home life, basically.

In describing Thea, well, she's brilliant, for one thing. Not that her grades would show it - no, her grades definitely don't reflect her intelligence. But still, the girl's whip smart, she's got a wicked sense of humor, and she's an incredible artist, who loves high art and street art equally. Goya and Gerhard Richter; Jessica Hess and Chris Stain: same difference. Unfortunately, beyond her sixth-period art classes, Thea hates every minute of every day of school. On the bright side, she's madly in love with her boyfriend, Cam, who is the first boyfriend she's ever had.

As for Cam, he's eighteen, a senior who transferred to their school at the beginning of the year, and the passion Thea feels for photography and illustration, Cam feels for math and computers. Born in 1991, 1992, the idea that it's geeks, not the meek, who shall inherit the earth, is his birthright. Needless to say, Cam is very intelligent, not to mention very handsome. So much so that Thea can't help smiling, simply saying his name out loud, so, of course, she does her best not to speak his name, certainly not in her mother's presence. The thing about Cam is that he is the first person who has ever made Thea feel beautiful, talented, special, funny. He really gets her and no one else ever has, not even close. You don't have to be fifteen to appreciate how that feels.

In any case, by the spring, they know each other well enough to finish each other's sentences. And, like many teenagers, Thea and Cam spend most of their free time online - they live on the Internet, no exaggeration - and they are insatiable downloaders of music, videos, movies and games, pirated or otherwise. Perhaps, from the outside, they appear a couple of small town kids with few options to experience the world at large, and yet, for them, like kids their age, living all over the world, imagery is wealth, a very real currency. In fact, the two like to think of themselves as the Bonnie and Clyde of visual image banks, and together, using their cache of jpegs and a hardcover spiral notebook, they collaborate in creating their own private world of photographs, drawings, writing, screenplay ideas, inside jokes - filling the book with anything that comes to mind. Really, the two share everything, and they're inseparable.

Then, one afternoon in April 2009, leaving Thea's house after school, just as he's about to get in his car, Cam calls after her, and jokingly, teasing Thea about her name, he asks, "What if God was a teenage girl?" And with that, Thea's whole world starts falling apart. For starters, Cam disappears the next day. A local police detective named Knox is assigned to the case, and then, a few days later, the FBI step in, repeatedly pulling Thea out of class to question her. Which she wouldn't mind in the least, were it not for the fact that she takes an immediate and intense disliking to the FBI agent assigned to Cam's case, a guy named Foley. Thea makes no effort to hide her disliking of the man, for many reasons, not the least of which is because Foley claims that not only is Cam not who she thinks he is, worse, he insists that Cam has been lying to Thea from the day they met.

So, day after day, class after class, Thea's life is turned upside down and inside out. Within a week's time, Thea's medical history is revealed; a sex tape of Thea and Cam appears on the Internet; then, when a graphic video involving a fifteen-year-old minor goes viral, the story becomes national news. Not surprisingly, Thea receives seven-figure offers for life rights from Hollywood studios; publishers and lawyers come calling. In less than a month after Cam's disappearance, Thea's sanity is alternately questioned and pushed to the brink.

In contrast, she finds great comfort - or at least some reassurance in the presence of Detective Knox, who, turns out, has a daughter Thea's age, Melody. Soon enough, the two girls become best friends, even though Thea is the only person in the world who can actually speak to Melody for reasons that are slowly revealed, once Thea gives Melody a spiral notebook. The reason Thea gives Melody this book is so that they can create and share a world of their own, but also because she believes if a picture can speak a thousand words, maybe they can give Melody a voice that others can hear, too.

Visually inspired, but character-driven, Saccades is, of course, a love story, but it's also about faith; about a young woman struggling to believe in the person she trusts most in this world, despite a web of evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, many fantastic events occur in Thea's life, any of which may or may not be explained, like, for instance, all her digital files begin decaying. So call it magical virtual realism, deus ex Macintosh, or, as the Brits say, a "paranormal romance" (what romance isn't, really?), the novel has strong crosscurrents of surrealism and the supernatural.

But however outlandish, what matters most is that this is a story about a fifteen-year-old girl that will talk about teenagers with real honesty, by talking honestly with real teenagers, as frightening as that might be at times. That said, this novel will appeal to adults and teenagers, equally, inasmuch as movies like KIDS, Thirteen, Brick, Elephant, and the novel Go Ask Alice. (For that matter, Thea's idea of a teenage soap opera is Twin Peaks, not Gossip Girl.) Frankly, I see no reason not to write for both audiences, equally

Naturally, sexuality is a cornerstone of this book, and will be quite explicit at times. How could it be otherwise, given that kids are growing up at the speed of WiFi, pornography has become such a household item that underage girls don't get in trouble for sneaking out at night, they get grounded for staying home, in their bedrooms, taking and sending naked pictures of themselves to boys on their cell phones, and even the twelve-year-olds who made headlines, excuse the pun, for starting after-school "clubs", teaching each other how to perform fellatio, are now old news. Yet, the portrayal of teen sex and sexuality will remain responsible, that is, honest and true to character, true to the constant tension of feeling so confident and so insecure, so young and so old, that Thea acts like she's fifteen going on thirty-six at one moment, and in the next, she's thirty-six going on seven years old, a girl again.