The Shadow Year

I can't believe how quickly I read this. I honestly expected three or four days of picking it up and putting it down when a bright distraction went by, but once I picked it up I'll be damned if anything other than an earthquake was going to interrupt. It's not as if it's a fast 'n' furious thriller. It's a slow, atmospheric tale of a strange year as seen from the point of view of a young boy in a small American town, which is practically a genre of its own. Every other Stephen King book, Ray Bradbury, Rober R McCammon's Boy's Life and the late great Graham Joyce's Tooth Fairy did one in England. What has to happen is that the young protagonist has to be in the cusp of leaving childhood behind and as the fog of innocence fades and the show more other fog of hormones rises to take its place, strange things emerge from the murk. Unreal, half-real, surreal. In The Shadow Year, it's a long white car driven by a man in a white coat. It's people dying and disappearing. It's the model town in the basement and the eerie correspondences between the little figures moved by little sister Mary and the people in the real town above. It's a hundred other things, some strange, some banal, and the whole year exerts a strange fascination over the reader and draws them in as the town reveals its secrets but somehow every secret seems to make it more strange and mysterious, a thing constructed from faded dreams and memories. Wonderful prose paints the place and the people and then tilts them all slightly askew. Compulsively readable. show less

The Shadow Year chronicles a year in the life of a sixth grader who narrates and remains unnamed. Like all of the other details that are spot-on, Ford gets right that for kids a year begins with the start of school and ends the following summer.

This book nails the details of the narrator's life. It describes that coming-of-age period when we realize that some people hurt little kids and that sometimes our parents aren't doing as good of a job as they should. The characters in this book feel like real people and do the things that real people do.

The book has a supernatural element as well with the narrator's sister, Mary, using a miniature version of their town and its inhabitants to predict events with some reliability. In many ways, show more the supernatural part of the plot was secondary to the plot of a child's life in a family with problems. There is a scene where the boys purposely encourage their alcoholic mother to drink so they can sneak out of the house that feels so devastatingly real it is almost unbearable to fathom.

In the end, the most important thing about the book is that Jeffrey Ford can really write. Each description is a pleasure to read. show less

Ford has a secure grasp of the darkness of childhood with an addicted parent, along with the ways a child can find brightness in order to live with it. Descriptions are elegant, and the main character is one you can imagine growing into the writer of this tale. A child, looking to create his own world, would very likely get caught up in Botchtown, using his siblings as fodder for his imagination.

I found the ending to be a little too cookie-cutter, given the treasured jagged edges of the beginning of the novel. For me, the jagged edges are what allow a story to become real in my mind, what attach themselves to me. The ending lacked this attachment for me. (I cannot say how I would have hoped to rectify this, only that it felt as though show more Ford ran out of material after a very solid 225 pages.)

**Spoiler alert, kind of**
Ford gives clues as to the truth about Ray, and I was okay with the paranormal hints regarding the character. If anything, the questions which are presented in passing give strength to the childlike quality of the narrator. There was absolutely no need to solidify the assumptions of the main character with a "years later" epilogue. show less

A boy growing up in the a small Long Island town in the 1960s discovers that a serial killer is stalking his neighborhood.

This is a quirky coming-of-age story with a nostalgic small-town feel and an undercurrent of the sinister, as well as the supernatural. Ford is great with characters, especially the dysfunctional but still affectionate family of the unnamed narrator. The narrator has a hobby of writing little stories about his neighbors, and we get to know them and their eccentricities that way. He and his older brother have also recreated their neighborhood in their basement, a model made out of junk called Botch Town, where their odd younger sister moves the figures in a way that eerily predicts real-life events. The story is a mix show more of short vignettes about a pivotal year in the boy's life and the ongoing plot of the siblings' efforts to catch Mr. White, a creepy man in a white car who they suspect is murdering people. They have the help of an older neighborhood kid who moved away but mysteriously reappeared. Mixed in are nostalgic stories with a realistic edge: the horrors of middle school; dealing with an alcoholic, depressed mother; the antics of a Halloween night; an exuberant Christmas party; rambling through the nearby woods. There is an epilogue that feels tacked on and probably wasn't necessary, but otherwise this is a little gem of a book. show less

La trama se sitúa en Long Island, en los años 60, y el protagonista narra en primera persona lo que le sucedió cuando tenía unos 11 años. Este vive junto a su hermano mayor Jim y su hermana pequeña Mary, así como con su madre alcoholizada, y un padre que siempre está trabajando. Los abuelos viven en una especie de casa adosada.

Toda la historia transcurre entre los nostálgicos recuerdos del narrador, donde destaca la figura de un mirón que acosa a los vecinos, adjudicándose el papel de investigadores tanto él como sus hermanos.

‘El año sombrío’ (The Shadow Year, 2008), del escritor estadounidense Jeffrey Ford, ganó el Premio Mundial de Fantasía del año 2009, para mí de manera incomprensible, ya que el elemento show more fantástico es mínimo. Y terror tampoco hay, solo un poco de suspense. En fin, que no ha sido lo que me esperaba. show less

“Her small stature, dark, and wrinkled complexion, and the silken black strands at the corners of her upper lip made her seem to me at times like some ancient monkey king. When she’d fart while standing, she’d kick her left leg up in the back and say: ‘Shoot him in the pants. The Coat and vest are mine.’”

In “The Shadow Years” by Jeffrey Ford

The world-wide craze for superheroes is obvious. We all see ourselves as passive victims and don't expect to rescue ourselves.

There's also the national craze for vampires and zombies in books, TV, movies, and the web. It may seem odd that a deeply Christian country is also obsessed with vampires, but as Joseph Glanvill wrote in the 1600s, if you deny the existence of demons and show more witches, you deny god. I see it as another form of projection: a few survivors are surrounded by the dead, i.e., the masses of the unemployed and soon-to-be-unemployable. I’m thinking USA here.

Magical realism is a bit like SF, where colorful, fanciful personas, places and technologies are used to explore all too real attitudes, trends and prejudices. It could be said that Ford's take on it is America's second exploration of the genre, since it was also prevalent in the 50's and 60's (and to some extent the 70's) with the proliferation of pulp magazines, SF publications (also the birth of the modern comic book) and SF movies and TV shows (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Star Trek). This post war boom was a symptom of America's unease with the new reality of The Bomb, Detente, the Cold War and the Red Menace.

It’s no coincidence that the resurgence of these Magical Realism genres occur at this time, when Americans again feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. American culture has always been hugely imaginative (it's not unique in that, of course) and I see no reason whatsoever why magic realism should be linked to a perceived decline in power.

Unfortunately, many English speakers don't seem to get the fact that magical realism started elsewhere a long time ago: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Gogol, Bulgakov, Garcia Marquez -- one could go on and on. It's these writers who captured the absurdity of so-called reality and the truths revealed by the so-called magic. Ford, in my mind, is the best American representative of this kind of fiction.

Bottom-Line:

1. Reality and fantasy today have changed places. Was the current Presidential election campaign reality, or fantasy? I'd argue that the campaign and our contemporary dilemmas (watching our "leaders" fiddle while Rome burns) is the latter. So it follows that “The Shadow Years” is addressing reality in the oblique, imaginative way that great art does;

2. Using the imagination is hardly a retreat. It's essential. It's our materialist, fact-centred world, suspicious of everything intangible, that is in full-blown retreat from true imaginative art (as opposed to the manipulative products of Hollywood). The American writer Kathleen Norris brilliantly examines what she calls Americans' fear of metaphor -- hence the rise of fundamentalist, literalist religion.

Ford is most of the time literary and beautiful, but this novel bummed me out. Downbeat and offbeat. Unfortunately I am not in the right phase of my life to love this stuff; but it does not prevent me from seeing what Ford was able to do.

Nevertheless, bring on more Beasts, please! show less

4.5 stars
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

The Shadow Year is a charming coming-of-age tale about the 6th grade year of an average American boy (we never learn his name) growing up in the 1960s. This year isn’t average, though, because there are some strange things going on in his small town. As he navigates his way around mundane matters such as an alcoholic manic depressive mother, a father who holds down three jobs, live-in grandparents, and unpleasant teachers, he’s also concerned with a prowler, a classmate who disappeared, and a strange suspicious man who drives an eerie white car. Things get really creepy when he realizes that the weird things happening around town seem to be linked to the way his possibly-autistic / show more possibly-savant little sister moves the cars and people around in his older brother’s replica of their town which he works on in their basement.

The Shadow Year feels more like mainstream fiction — it’s mostly about coming of age, family relationships, and living in a small town. Except for the wonder at Mary’s abilities, the supernatural elements are down-played and don’t become obvious until the end. The novel reminds me very much of A Christmas Story — that classic movie about Ralphie who wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas ("You'll shoot your eye out!"). Similarly, Jeffrey Ford fills his story with over-the-top characters who are fun to read about but who you’re glad you don’t live with and who you have a hard time believing could all co-exist in the same small town.

Also similarly, most of the plot revolves around the day to day events in a 6th grade boy’s life: waiting for the ice cream man, trying to complete school assignments with a minimal amount of effort, getting picked on by older kids, skipping church, sneaking out of the house, and trying to keep up with his brave and reckless older brother. These little slices of life are funny, poignant, and so beautifully and vividly described that they often brought a smile to my face and occasionally brought tears to my eyes. Here’s a passage about the ice cream man:

Occasionally Mel would try to be pleasant, but I think the paper canoe of a hat he wore every day soured him. He also wore a blue bow tie, a white shirt, and white pants. His face was long and crooked, and at times, when the orders came to fast and the kids didn’t have the right change, the bottom half of his face would slowly melt — a sundae abandoned at the curb…. In a voice that came straight from his freezer, he called my sister, Mary, and all the other girls “sweetheart.”

The Shadow Year is worth reading simply for Jeffrey Ford’s excellent imagery and atmosphere, powerful prose, and razor-sharp descriptions of life we can relate to, but it’s also a good mystery with plenty of tension and suspense. The relationship we observe between the boy and his older brother and little sister is truly touching. I have to add, also, that our ability to engage with a character whose name we never know is surprising and indicates Ford’s confidence and courage.

Despite its subject material, The Shadow Year is not a book for kids because of the language and sexual content. I listened to Audible Frontier’s production of The Shadow Year which was read by Kevin T. Collins who has an astonishing range of voices at his command. His excellent narration definitely added to my reading enjoyment and I’ll be looking for his name in the future.

I’m already on to my second Jeffrey Ford novel. He’s now on my list of must-be-read authors. show less