I am not a big fan of the creepy, so this one sat on my pile for about a month before I finally picked it up. I can’t say I’m entirely glad I did, because I was absolutely right about it being extremely creepy, but I am glad to come here and tell you that it’s very well done. (And that when it was over I needed to pet puppies and hug babies.)
Iris and her best friend Collette (both 14) are having another restless, boring summer in the small town of Ondine, Louisiana (population: 346 GOOD PEOPLE AND 3 CRANKY OLD COOTS – loved that). Their childhood games of innocent make-believe have added, at Collette’s urging, elements of romance and love spells. One summer afternoon they meet at the graveyard to “cast spells,” except this time, the game is far from innocent: Iris sees a flash of a ghost, who whispers in her ear: “Where y’at, Iris?”
With some help from Ben, a local boy that Collette has a crush on, and his grandmother’s Ouija board, Iris and Collette learn that Iris has been visited by the ghost of Elijah Landry, a local teenager who disappeared before they were born. They spend the summer trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not – in their lives, their town, and the ghost story itself. I’m not giving you many details because this is a book that benefits from a lot of surprises, and I think the less you know, the better it reads. The flap copy is, I was happy to see, very spare and non-spoilery.
This book creeped me out quite a bit, and there aren’t a lot of middle-grade books out there that do this. Mitchell’s chosen genre is fairly empty, and I think she could turn out to be at the forefront of a welcome resurgance in gothic/horror/ghost mysteries for kids. (At least, I hope so – I think this is a genre that needs a resurgance. I never know what to hand kids when they come in for creepy. Coraline, yes, but then the pickings grow increasingly slim.) Mitchell’s descriptions (especially those of places) are a high point in the book; they make the prose exceptionally atmospheric and evocative.
I do, however, have some quibbles with SHADOWED SUMMER. Character development tends to fall by the wayside in favor of surging ahead with the plot, and I wish it hadn’t. I found the beginning especially abrupt, and didn’t think I had much of a feel for either Iris or Collette before the book plunged right into the ghost story/mystery. Because it started out that way, I never really felt like the characters developed enough for me to know them. The plot is exciting enough that the book is still very enjoyable, but I would have liked it to be about ten pages longer in order to give the reader the details I felt like it was missing. Can I tell you which details specifically I was missing? Not really – I just ended the book with an overall wish that characters had been more fully fleshed out. I would have liked a little more plot padding at the end as well. The most surprising twist in the story comes mere pages from the last words, and I felt that there needed to be a little bit more after that than there was.
But again, these are not quibbles that kept me from thoroughly enjoying the book and hoping to see more from this author. (Not a sequel, I hope; I don’t think this book needs one. But more in this genre, absolutely, yes please.)
Before I end this, I have to say: I hate the cover. It is just a mess. The design looks dated, for one thing – this looks like a Mary Downing Hahn cover would have looked in the eighties. I don’t know who that girl is, but she doesn’t look like Iris to me. (I’m pretty sure, for one thing, that Iris wouldn’t be wearing a dress like that in the middle of a Louisiana summer) This is my biggest problem with full face photo covers: I want to imagine what the main character looks like, and the full face photo cover makes that impossible. The clear photo of the girl is too stark a contrast from the photos of everything else, which are almost impossible to make out. Honestly, though, the title font is the worst part. That is one of the worst title fonts I have ever seen. I sincerely hope they change this cover for the paperback, because RH is not doing this book any favors with this cover. This book deserves a better cover.
And, of course, once again: what boy is going to pick this up? There’s a giant picture of a girl on the cover. To the majority of boy readers, girl on cover = girl book. While there’s a little bit of a burgeoning romance thing going on in this book, it’s hardly what I would call a major plot point, and the extreme creepiness would certainly appeal to a lot of boys. Why do publishers insist on cutting off a big chunk of their potential audience from the very beginning?
