Shadowed Summer
Jun. 18th, 2009 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkstowolvesBack in February, I was sufficiently entertained by Sarah Rees Brennan's enthusiastic review* of Saundra Mitchell's Shadowed Summer that I decided to take a chance on it. Of course, by this I mean that I entered her give-away of the book and was lucky enough to win one of the copies she and the author were putting up themselves. My copy arrived sometime in late February, sweetly personalized by Saundra Mitchell.
Of course, it then had to do its tour of duty on the to-read shelf, where it lurked for some four months before I picked it up and devoured it over the past couple of days. This book was truly an excellent diversion: it's a small-town mystery, it's a Southern Gothic novel, it's a coming-of-age story. It's about ghosts and hypocrisy and friendship and bigotry and summer. Considering it's all this in less than 200 pages, it either explodes in a mess or packs a wallop. Let me assure you that it's the latter, a tightly-written page-turner that manages to be creepily provocative without being soberingly depressing.
If you need something more concrete about it than that, let me set the scene for you: Iris lives in Ondine, Louisiana, a small town where the phrase "nothing ever happens" is the king descriptor. Iris and her best friend, Collette, are in their early teens, caught midway between their childish games of make-believe (playing with naiads, raising ghosts) and the more adult realm of getting out of Ondine and discovering boys. In the summer of the book, Collette discovers a nice young man named Ben. Iris, on the other hand, discovers a mysterious boy named Elijah. One thing you should know: Elijah is dead.
There were only a couple of drawbacks for me: one is plot-based, while the other two are text-based. I'd rather leave the plot-related question out of this review as I think it can be explained, albeit a bit tortuously, and it doesn't prevent one's enjoyment of the book. However, as a Southerner, the two text-related issues were nagging enough either to annoy me or to throw me out of the story completely.
The first words that the ghost, Elijah, says to Iris are "Where y'at, Iris?" This is all over the cover copy and is also printed on the nice bookmark Saundra so kindly included with the book. This phrase is used several other times in the book and is indicated to be a general "How are you?" query.
My problem is that I had never heard this phrase used in such a manner. I actually had to Google it and thus discovered that it's a piece of New Orleans' slang. While I'm willing to believe that New Orleans' slang has radiated outward into insular Louisiana towns, it still gives me pause and requires rationalization.
The second textual hiccup is even worse: the word "pop" is used to indicate soda. This is a huge gaffe. In the South, we pretty much say "soda" or "cola" or "Coke" or the specific name of the product. "Pop" is someone's father or something terrible you do to balloons. It is not a carbonated beverage. This misnomer doesn't come up until more than half-way into the novel and is only used a couple of times, but the rest of the setting is so authentically Southern that I was very disappointed by the sudden glaring error. I was completely thrown out of the story and had to put the book down for a bit.
Other than that, though, it's just great. If you're a fan of YA literature, give it a try!
* Sarah's review was actually a good bit longer than it appears in its current incarnation: her journal was maliciously commandeered and deleted some weeks ago and her journal recovery hasn't been perfect (but at least has been far better than some other victims of the same scheme). This is where I put in my support for Kyle Cassidy's LJ Advisory Board nomination.
Of course, it then had to do its tour of duty on the to-read shelf, where it lurked for some four months before I picked it up and devoured it over the past couple of days. This book was truly an excellent diversion: it's a small-town mystery, it's a Southern Gothic novel, it's a coming-of-age story. It's about ghosts and hypocrisy and friendship and bigotry and summer. Considering it's all this in less than 200 pages, it either explodes in a mess or packs a wallop. Let me assure you that it's the latter, a tightly-written page-turner that manages to be creepily provocative without being soberingly depressing.
If you need something more concrete about it than that, let me set the scene for you: Iris lives in Ondine, Louisiana, a small town where the phrase "nothing ever happens" is the king descriptor. Iris and her best friend, Collette, are in their early teens, caught midway between their childish games of make-believe (playing with naiads, raising ghosts) and the more adult realm of getting out of Ondine and discovering boys. In the summer of the book, Collette discovers a nice young man named Ben. Iris, on the other hand, discovers a mysterious boy named Elijah. One thing you should know: Elijah is dead.
There were only a couple of drawbacks for me: one is plot-based, while the other two are text-based. I'd rather leave the plot-related question out of this review as I think it can be explained, albeit a bit tortuously, and it doesn't prevent one's enjoyment of the book. However, as a Southerner, the two text-related issues were nagging enough either to annoy me or to throw me out of the story completely.
The first words that the ghost, Elijah, says to Iris are "Where y'at, Iris?" This is all over the cover copy and is also printed on the nice bookmark Saundra so kindly included with the book. This phrase is used several other times in the book and is indicated to be a general "How are you?" query.
My problem is that I had never heard this phrase used in such a manner. I actually had to Google it and thus discovered that it's a piece of New Orleans' slang. While I'm willing to believe that New Orleans' slang has radiated outward into insular Louisiana towns, it still gives me pause and requires rationalization.
The second textual hiccup is even worse: the word "pop" is used to indicate soda. This is a huge gaffe. In the South, we pretty much say "soda" or "cola" or "Coke" or the specific name of the product. "Pop" is someone's father or something terrible you do to balloons. It is not a carbonated beverage. This misnomer doesn't come up until more than half-way into the novel and is only used a couple of times, but the rest of the setting is so authentically Southern that I was very disappointed by the sudden glaring error. I was completely thrown out of the story and had to put the book down for a bit.
Other than that, though, it's just great. If you're a fan of YA literature, give it a try!
* Sarah's review was actually a good bit longer than it appears in its current incarnation: her journal was maliciously commandeered and deleted some weeks ago and her journal recovery hasn't been perfect (but at least has been far better than some other victims of the same scheme). This is where I put in my support for Kyle Cassidy's LJ Advisory Board nomination.