Shadow of Ashland [Hardcover]

Terence M. Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1996

A request from his dying mother sends Leo Nolan on a quest in search of his long-lost uncle, who left Toronto for the U.S. at the height of the Depression and has not been heard from in more than fifty years, along a trail that takes him to the small Kentucky town of Ashland.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As she is dying, Leo Nolan's mother asks him to find her brother Jack, who left home during the Great Depression and dropped out of sight. Leo's quest for his uncle takes him south to Ashland, Kentucky, where he discovers that the present lies in the unbreakable grip of the past.

From Publishers Weekly

This poignant if murky parable about love-old and new, lost and found-from a Canadian SF writer (Barking Dogs, 1988) is wonderfully imagined and poetically told. Days before she dies in March 1984, Leo Nolan's mother shows her son a rose that she claims was just given to her by her brother Jack, who vanished 50 years ago. After her death, letters from Jack, postmarked 1934, begin to arrive at her house, inspiring Leo to leave Toronto in order to retrace the letters' trail, which leads to Ashland, Ky. There, Leo visits Jack's last known address, an anachronistic rooming house still operated after half a century by the same proprietors. In Ashland, the seeker finds love, through an affair with an unmarried mother with a young son, and also magic as he is transported across time to relive the last seven days of Jack's life. Leo then returns to Canada, where he experiences not only a deepening of his life's mysteries but also an epiphany involving his failed marriage and stillborn son. With Leo's narration as evocative as the pages of a newly discovered family album, this proves a remarkably affecting literary work that the publisher rightly compares to Jack Finney's Time and Again.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 223 pages
• Publisher: Forge; 1st edition (March 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312859589
• ISBN-13: 978-0312859589
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,581,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Terence M Green -- born and still resident in Toronto, Ontario, Canada -- the author of 7 books, holds MA and BA degrees from University College, Dublin, and BA and BEd degrees from the University of Toronto. A retired secondary school English teacher (career spanning 31 years), he was the first writer-in-residence in more than 20 years at Mohawk College (Hamilton, Ontario)in 2003-2004. A 2-time World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Novel, profiled in such places as "Canadian Who's Who," "Contemporary Authors" and "The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature," he has conducted writing workshops from Florida to the Yukon. Currently, he is lecturer (creative writing) at the University of Western Ontario.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written book, November 20, 2000

By 

Joan C. Soper (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shadow of Ashland (Mass Market Paperback)

In this brief and lovely book, the narrator, Leo, goes on a search for his uncle, missing for fifty years. In the process, he travels back in time to depression era Kentucky, a literary device which is beautifully done and does not seem at all out of place. The author's prose is straightforward and moving in its simplicity, and themes of hardship, loss, remembrance and recovery are woven into the story in a way that stays with you. One of the best books I've read in a long time.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A quick read, March 12, 2000

By 

RonaGoldfarb (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shadow of Ashland (Paperback)

Leo Nolan is at first glance trying to fill a void for his dying mother. In his search for her lost brother he is transported to another time, when troubles ran deep. The characters are easy to grasp, and attention to detail is not necessary. The intermingling of the here and the "then" is inviting. I found this book to be a compelling quick read, worthy of passing onto others.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ho Hum -- More Time Travel, September 20, 2003

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shadow of Ashland (Paperback)

Shadow is a competently plotted and executed novel, which takes as its departure point a man's search for his long-disappeared uncle who appeared to his mother on her deathbed. Reality, vision, near-death hallucination, it's never clear what she saw, but not long after her death letters from the missing man, written fifty years before just after he abandoned Toronto and headed south to the U.S. in the depths of the Great Depression, begin to arrive. Navigating by the trail of postmarks the nephew reaches Ashland where he encounters his again young uncle one midnight outside the hospital where the uncle worked briefly. Soon he travels back to Great Depression Ashland and is deep into a farfetched miners' plot to rob a bank. There is plenty of trenchant commentary on the rich, much third person detail of depression suffering (recounting the deaths of children is a favorite theme), a love triangle, a new romance for the jaded but brittle narrator, praise for Fr. Coughlin, the Nazi-sympathizer priest who captivated radio audiences in the Thirties, and some fairly stilted dialogue meant as romantic banter. None of this engaged me much, however, and I finished the short novel with nothing more than a sense of another book read and not likely to be long-remembered.