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Grammy paid me for taking care of her garden and feeding the birds, and you, my dear readers, know what that means. I bought gas and headed to the local independent bookstore. I love that place; the people there don't mind if I pull a book off the shelf and just start reading. They even have convenient armchairs for people like me. Even when I'm broke, I like to go there with my laptop, chat with the staff, and regale hapless visitors to the Young Adult section with what I think they should read (or buy for the young adults in their lives).
Lo and behold, Shadowed Summer by debut author and member of the 2009 debutantes Saundra Mitchell sat miss-shelved under the R's, and it's just by chance I saw it while searching for The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Mitchell's fellow deb, Carrie Ryan, which was, alas, not to be found.
Anyway, the plot didn't really sound like my cup of tea, being a ghost story mystery, but it's Young Adult fantasy, and besides, it's Mitchell's first book and I like to support new authors, so I pulled it off the shelf and decided that if I was still reading by page fifty, I'd buy it. Well, I read the whole way through without even looking at the pages, and rushed over to the counter to buy it.
Iris is a fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the supernatural. To alleviate the boredom of living in a town without even a movie theater (and don't I know what that's like) she and her best friend make up ghost stories and spells, all written down in a pair of inconspicuous spiral notebooks. But that year, Iris' partner in crime has new interests, a boy. At the same time, ghosts become very real when Iris sees one in a graveyard, the subject of a local mystery from before she was born. As he keeps haunting her, Iris decides to find the truth behind his disappearance. And while she's at it, what do her parents have to do with it?
( It seems to me that if there were ghosts, the last place you'd find them is a cemetery. )
Shadowed Summer is a good old fashioned ghost story, sort, sweet, by turns spooky and sad, and absolutely hilarious. In no other genre can a funeral be such a fulfilling, almost happy experience. Besides, I have now discovered, I'm a sucker for repeated historic grave desecration... All in the name of a good cause, of course.
Saundra Mitchell can be found on Livejournal at anywherebeyond.
Lo and behold, Shadowed Summer by debut author and member of the 2009 debutantes Saundra Mitchell sat miss-shelved under the R's, and it's just by chance I saw it while searching for The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Mitchell's fellow deb, Carrie Ryan, which was, alas, not to be found.
Anyway, the plot didn't really sound like my cup of tea, being a ghost story mystery, but it's Young Adult fantasy, and besides, it's Mitchell's first book and I like to support new authors, so I pulled it off the shelf and decided that if I was still reading by page fifty, I'd buy it. Well, I read the whole way through without even looking at the pages, and rushed over to the counter to buy it.
Iris is a fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the supernatural. To alleviate the boredom of living in a town without even a movie theater (and don't I know what that's like) she and her best friend make up ghost stories and spells, all written down in a pair of inconspicuous spiral notebooks. But that year, Iris' partner in crime has new interests, a boy. At the same time, ghosts become very real when Iris sees one in a graveyard, the subject of a local mystery from before she was born. As he keeps haunting her, Iris decides to find the truth behind his disappearance. And while she's at it, what do her parents have to do with it?
( It seems to me that if there were ghosts, the last place you'd find them is a cemetery. )
Shadowed Summer is a good old fashioned ghost story, sort, sweet, by turns spooky and sad, and absolutely hilarious. In no other genre can a funeral be such a fulfilling, almost happy experience. Besides, I have now discovered, I'm a sucker for repeated historic grave desecration... All in the name of a good cause, of course.
Saundra Mitchell can be found on Livejournal at anywherebeyond.
