The Noticer By Andy Andrews

"Sometimes all a person needs is a little perspective."

Perspective is defined as a specific point of view in understanding or judging things or events, esp. one that shows them in their true relations to one another. For example I have a friend whose kids are always borrowing her work gloves. On the one hand this is good because they are doing work, however the gloves need to be returned so that she can use them. To ensure that her gloves were returned she wrote three letters "MOM" on the fingers of her gloves so that when her kids were wearing the gloves they would look down and remember that they were wearing mom's gloves. One day as she was wearing the gloves her youngest child said "mom, why do your gloves say WOW". Its all in how you look at things. From his view point the gloves said "wow" when from were she stood they said "mom".

In The Noticer, Andy Andrews does a fabulous job of dealing with perspective and a different way of thinking. We are introduced to a character who is a simple old man in which Mr. Andrews shows us more than one way to look at a situation that his other characters are dealing with. The main character Jones, "not Mr. Jones, just Jones" is a wonderful character and has you constantly thinking. The best part about Jones is that you start to think outside of your little circle. He is the character that asks the tough questions. He also seems to know just when the next person that he is dealing with is close to or at rock bottom and will be willing to listen to those questions and see how they apply to their lives.

Some of the draw back to the book is that you get involved in the characters lives and then never get the follow through, it is all left up to your imagination as to what they did with their perspective which is both good and sometimes lonely when you want to know more about those characters lives. All of the characters are well developed and as you read the book you can actually picture them and in some cases pick them out in your own community.

When you finish the book you will be challenged to look at the mother's gloves differently: do they say "mom", the woman who gave birth to a child or do they say "wow" someone loaned me a pair of gloves that I should take care of and return better than I got them.