From Publishers Weekly
In Edgar-winner Ford's disappointing sixth novel, the narrator—a nameless boy growing up on suburban Long Island in the mid-1960s—spends what remains of his summer vacation roaming the neighborhood with his older brother, Jim. At home, money is tight, forcing their father to work three jobs while their mother drinks herself to sleep every night. A prowler may be loose on the streets, and the narrator and Jim see a menacing man in a white car lurking near their house and school. When a local boy disappears soon after school starts, the narrator and Jim are sure Mr. White is responsible. They turn to their younger sister, Mary, for help, after she mysteriously moves figurines in the boys' model town, reflecting events before they've occurred. The stage is set for suspense, yet Ford (
The Girl in the Glass) deflates it at every opportunity with his unresolved subplots. Instead of building to a thrilling climax, the story peters out and loose ends are either forgotten or tied up too neatly.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"The Shadow Year captures the totality of a lived period, its actualities and its dreams, its mundane essentials and its odd subjective imperatives; it is a work of episodic beauty and mercurial significance." (Nick Gevers, Locus )
"Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too. For those of you-and you know who you are-who think the indispensable element for good genre fiction is good writing, this is not to be missed." (Kirkus Review, Starred )
"Properly creepy, but from time to time deliciously funny and heart-breakingly poignant, too." (Kirkus Reviews (starred review) )
"Think Ray Bradbury's Green Town stories, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Stephen King's The Body (made into the film Stand by Me) and you get an idea of the tone of Ford's latest fine work. Grade: A" (Rocky Mountain News )
"Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford." (Boston Globe on THE SHADOW YEAR )
"We should be grateful that alongside the firm of Updike, Cheever, Ford & Company there exists, in both fiction and film, an American tradition that depicts the suburbs as places of wonder rather than stultification, discovery rather than predictability." (New York Newsday )
"Jeffrey Ford's latest triumph, THE SHADOW YEAR, is as haunting as it is humorous.readers will recognize real talent in Ford's vivid, unerring voice." (Louisville Courier Journal on THE SHADOW YEAR )
"Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen." (Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden Sea )
"Surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue." (Booklist )
"Superb, heartbreaking, and masterfully written . . . It's proof of Jeffrey Ford's narrative power that, ultimately, the distinction [between real and invented] doesn't much matter. His made-up world trumps ours." (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction )
