A Look AT Eyes Wide Open By Ted Dekker

“Who am I?
My name is Christy Snow. I’m seventeen and I’m about to die. I’m buried in a coffin under tons of concrete. No one knows where I am. My heart sounds like a monster with clobber feet, running straight toward me. I’m lying on my back, soaked with sweat from the hair on my head to the soles of my feet. My hands and feet won’t stop shaking.
Some will say that I’m not really here. Some will say I’m delusional. Some will say that I don’t even exist. But who are they? I’m the one buried in a grave.
My name is Christy Snow. I’m seventeen. I’m about to die. So who are you?”

Excerpt from the back cover of the book.

Accidentally becoming lost at a mental hospital are two teenage friends named Austin and Christy, both of whom had “forgotten” childhoods. You would assume that everything would be alright once they could explain their predicament, and they would then leave and go on their journey. However, Ted Dekker had other plans for this book.

Eyes Wide Open is sheer excitement from the first page to the last, pure entertainment filled with unavoidable truth, buzzing with energy and shocking turns. Everything is not as it seems.

Eyes Wide Open A Spoiler Review

Christy Snow is a 17-year-old orphan with a hazy past and an even more lonely present. Her only friend is a Harvard teen, Austin, who takes auditing classes who she met at the orphanage she grew up in. Austin is a deep thinker but just like Christy, he’s a loner.

Austin had uncovered a hospital supply room stocked with outdated medical equipment and books many years previously. He discovered a way to get inside, and now Christy and he occasionally hang out there.

Christy rushes to the storage area to seek for her priceless locket when it disappears one day. While reaching for the locket after spotting it, she stumbles and falls through a hole in the floor. She finds herself imprisoned in the hospital’s ventilation system. Before her phone dies, she manages to quickly call Austin. She eventually succeeds in slipping out of the vent and into an old boiler chamber before ascending a staircase to a hospital corridor. She quickly realizes that she has entered a psychiatric hospital.

Staff of the hospital however, are convinced that she is Alice Ringwald and they refuse to let her leave though she kept saying she wasn’t Alice. In a bid to rescue Christy enters the boiler chamber and there he meets a man named Douglas Fisher, the hospitals administrator, who seems to be experimenting on someone. Noticing Austin, Fisher knocks him out and Austin wakes to see he has been admitted as a delusional patient under the name Scott Connelly.

Christy and Austin ineffectively try to escape numerous times. While in the hospital, they meet with different staffs like Kern Lawson who tells them they are out of their minds using their fears and insecurities as a stronghold over them. Eventually, Christy and Austin begin to doubt what they know as their reality.

When Fisher tells Christy and Austin he can fix them, Christy welcomes the idea due to her insecurities about her body and goes through numerous surgeries which leave her looking horrible.

Meanwhile, Austin is kept in a dark room in other to break his resolve. Once he escaped from the room, he murdered Fisher and put him in the morgue however, Fisher appeared later. Austin is continually tortured emotionally while Christy is being prepared for another surgery on her body when they find two pairs of glasses. They are able to recognize their selves once again when they put them on.

With the glasses on, they are able to pass through the hospital doors till they reach a mountain where they meet a man called Outlaw who tells them they are just the way they are meant to be and don’t need fixing. He tells them he can lead them out of the hospital and to remember everything he has said; to accept the truth. They are then back in the hospital.

Christy doesn’t forget Outlaws words through everything that happens in the hospital but Austin breaks. Christy, in an out-of-body experience, sees herself on the operating table, then stabs and kills her corporeal body. Finally free, she proceeds to get Austin from the dark room. She is able to convince Austin that the room isn’t real and she leads him out of the institution. They find themselves outside a regular hospital whose psychiatric ward was undergoing reconstruction.

Back to their normal lives, Christy then sees Outlaw on a bench where he tells her that she, Austin and other patients were raised by monks as an experiment. However, it became apparent that even the best Christian upbringing would not guarantee children growing up to be fearless leaders of humanity and so the idea was abandoned. The children’s memories were erased and they were returned to the outside world. Christy is the first, according to Outlaw, to recover her true identity after escaping the deception of the world. He exhorts her to never lose sight of how lovely and whole she is. According to Outlaw, other people will someday be able to escape their own jails just like Austin did.

My Opinion:

This book is the definition of thrilling! At a point, I wasn’t even sure who was who! This book was so captivating and I honestly couldn’t drop this book once I started reading it., that’s how hooked I was on it. I would give this book a 4 out of 5. This book certainly did its job as the first book of the four-part series, keeping its readers entertained and wanting to read the other books. This novel, written by a Christian thriller author, didn’t have the customary sweetness of most of its competitors but was nevertheless able to convey the message.

If you appreciate thrillers that keep you turning the pages till the very end, you should check out this book!

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