it did keep my attention, except for when things got a little esoteric with all the lens talk at first. i found helen, the main character, to be lacking a kind of innate self-awareness/consciousness –– we may call someone like her "spineless" –– but after finishing the book, i think that we are all a lot more complicated than that. wherever one person interacts with another, there is politics. even a pebble can be political. an entertaining read because of the impending stakes and climax that occurs at the end, and hew is made to be a particularly loveable man through the eyes of helen. the reader is supposed to like hew, as helen does, and aspire to be like him, just as helen seems to. his triumph in the resolution is no coincidence. i feel like maybe i've learned something about high focus people or the kind of genius that results in a call from the king of sweden -- something i don't have and don't want. but what i do have is the kind of optimism in one's self, belief in the fate i create day by day. something rooted to my inner life force, which of course is held together by those pesky things we call "values."