Those Neighborhood Kids

Alright, I'm going to jump right in--this is my issue with The Shadow Year: it's not To Kill a Mockingbird. What I say from here on out is with the disclaimer that I am aware I am probably being completely unfair to the author and definitely forcing a standard upon a book that was probably intended to be a different kind of book in the first place.

To get on task--I suppose it's an unfortunate way to think of things. I will explain: there is something endearing and children's lit-like to have a story about "the neighborhood kids." When it's children's lit, the neighborhood kids are usually narrated at the age they are portrayed, while I think in more grownup works the perspective shifts to an older narrator who is looking back on the time of being a neighborhood kid. Now, this is me making broad generalizations without very many examples, but I can come up with a few:

In children's books, the Trixie Belden mystery series (one of the Stratmeyer Syndicate-like mystery series with ghostwriters... though I don't think Trixie is affiliated with the same publishing group, or wasn't at first. She's like a more realistic Nancy Drew). The Marvin Redpost books by Louis Sachar. The Junie B. Jones books by Barbara Park. Most of these happen almost equally at school and in the neighborhood, but neighborhood life and adventures are just as important. The narrators are either third-person removed from the children while being on a child's level or, in the case of Junie B., narrated by the child herself.

Then there are the kind of retrospective neighborhood kid works, for older audiences. I think of The Shadow Year as part of this category--the narrator sounds too adult for the self he speaks of. Falling also into this category, unfortunately for Mr. Ford, is my mother's favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

In high school I would read To Kill a Mockingbird every October, holding off on finishing until Halloween because it is the last day of the book. I can quote book and movie--for the movie is truly excellent, and Gregory Peck is Atticus--word-for-word in places, and my mother and I reference it frequently. I have what I suppose I would call an obsession.

But getting back to my "classifications"--clearly, Scout narrates as an adult, looking back over her childhood and her "neighborhood kid" adventures. She notes the times when she was particularly naive with a kind of sad sweetness, knowing now the lessons her younger self would come to learn. The narrator of The Shadow Year, though--I didn't feel a connection to him like I felt with Scout. It was immediately obvious to me that there was something off about the way he talked about himself--I spent a few paragraphs wondering if he was just a very precocious child before realizing he was looking back--but it didn't seem well done. This is because, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's tone is effortless and evidently contrasting. There are key phrases that clue the reader in to who this narrator is and the fact that she speaks to us years later, but even then I can tell a marked difference between young Scout and narrator Scout. The narrator of The Shadow Year? He's just not as good.

And all my comparisons go that way. How I feel about the characters. Of course I worried for the characters in The Shadow Year and did some cringing and glancing out my window--but the thrill was different from the sweet, sad pangs delivered in a certain other book by our University of Alabama alumna Nelle Harper Lee. In a weird way, The Shadow Year didn't feel like just a thriller or just a ghost story, but like a popular novel that wanted to be literature. It felt forced. Or it felt like it hadn't been done entirely, or like it had been done and can't be improved on regardless.

I don't know what kind of book The Shadow Year is intended to be. And fantastic stories that are just there to be fantastic stories are fine. I have no problem with that. I suppose that my main problem was that this book just seemed neither here nor there. Like it wanted to be two different things--well, more like it wanted to try to mix them, but that somewhere it fell short. When trying to play up the fear or the fantastic, the narrative quality it was able to establish worked less. And when trying to play up that narrative quality, the supernatural element felt like an afterthought. To me, it just didn't work.

And those are my snobby, "literary" feelings about this book which we all purchased and which the author is making good money off of. As I have yet to be published in any profitable way I would like to conclude that my criticisms, while extant, are probably invalid, unfair, and dumb (they are really dumb, for real).

Meg