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Jeffrey Ford

The Shadow Year: A Novel Paperback – Bargain Price, March 17, 2009

by Jeffrey Ford (Author)

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On New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy spends much of his free time in the basement of his family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with figurines representing friends and neighbors. Their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her siblings, moves around the inanimate clay residents.

There is a strangeness in the air as disappearances, deaths, spectral sightings, and the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car mark this unforgettable shadow year. But strangest of all is the inescapable fact that all these troubling occurrences directly cor-respond to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in their basement.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

March 17, 2009
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.68 x 8 inches
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers who uses wonder instead of ink in his pen.” (Jonathan Carroll, author of The Wooden Sea )

“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 )

“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 )

“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.” (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 )

About the Author

Jeffrey Ford is the author of three previous story collections and eight previous novels, including the Edgar^® Award-winning The Girl in the Glass and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning The Shadow Year. A former professor of writing and early American literature, Ford now writes full-time in Ohio, where he lives with his wife.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003H4RBOE
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (March 17, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.68 x 8 inches

Customer Reviews:
62 ratings

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Jeffrey Ford

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Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab's Return, Or The Last Voyage, and Out of Body. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer's Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, and The Best of Jeffrey Ford from PS, Big Dark Hole, 2021, from Small Beer Press. Ford has published well over 100 short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Nebula, Shirley Jackson Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), Hayakawa Award (Japan). His fiction has been translated into about 20 languages. In addition to writing, he’s been a professor of literature and writing for 30 years and has been a guest lecturer at Clarion Writing Workshop, The Stone Coast MFA Program, The Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch University Writing Workshop. He lives in Ohio and currently teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Link to Ford's homepage -- http://www.well-builtcity.com/

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

62 global ratings

5 star		70%
4 star		21%
3 star		9%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Excellent Contemporary Fantasy & Magic Realism

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 18, 2018

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I enjoyed reading this well-written book where the MC reminisces as he looks back at his boyhood’s “Shadow Year,” filled with family problems and dark incidents touched by horror, the paranormal and supernatural. This book reads like contemporary fantasy, but it also skews toward magic realism.
The protagonists are wonderfully written—an unnamed 6th grader; his protective, older brother Jim, and younger sister Mary who is a 4th grader. I especially liked Mary who might be on the autism spectrum, has an alter named Mikey, plus two imaginary friends and teacher. She has a supernatural ability to sense where her neighbors are and she can foretell some events.
IMHO, the author probably had a vague but not solid plot in mind, because the storyline is very loosely woven. The reminiscing structure works, because it’s held together by realistic vignettes from a boy’s POV. At first the main storyline appears to link several peeping Tom incidents and a mysterious man in a white trench coat (Mr. White). Until it doesn’t. Add a missing, possibly dead boy and several strange deaths of adults, plus a older teenager named Ray who hides in empty buildings and comes out at night.
The paranormal appears in the form of a ghost, one real enough to touch the children but able to go through the killer and vanish. Mild horror elements are heightened by the children’s fears and dread about the missing boy, the peeping Tom and creepy Mr. White who drives around the town at night in a white car whilst looking for children.
The three children see the hidden side of their town, see incidents in a different light than adults, and keep secrets because adults—like policemen and even their parents—don’t take their opinions and findings seriously.
The end is satisfying although the children are shocked by Ray, albeit in a good way. Soon normal years return to the children’s lives.
4.5 stars bumped up to 5.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jennifer Silk

Nostalgia, mystery and adventure in a dark, suburban tale.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 19, 2021

Verified Purchase

I loved this book. I read it slowly to draw the experience out and will probably read it again. It never went astray and was just as dreamy, mysterious and funny from the beginning to the end. The characters are relatable and it has a similar 'coming of age' vibe as Stand by Me but is also filled with quirks and characters that are memorable and relatable. The trio of siblings at the centre of the story (The Boy (our narrator), Jim and Mary) are all so well drawn and their parents and grand-parents form a perfectly dysfunctional and loving family. The horror elements are truly scary and the mystery draws the reader in. Best of all the writing, I mean the prose itself is excellent. Recommended reading for anybody who loves reading.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 6, 2016

Verified Purchase

I first read this book as one of those offered by on-line book clubs, as a suggestion "just for me." Well, this time they were right. This book is just fine for me. I enjoyed it so much that I bought hard copy for my bookshelf. It brought back so many memories of those days in the 1960's. Ford's descriptions of school, family problems, bullies, food, etc... virtually the entire book, are so well portrayed through the eyes of a child. I can almost see the class, taste the ice cream, feel the fear. In 1969 we had a "killer on the loose" in my small Texas town. The fear of us kids (I was 11), although at times absolutely terrifying, never reached the point where we would not roam around town, go to the library, go to the store for Bazooka, ride our bikes, etc... In this book, however, the character of Mary is exceptional. I never really figured out how much she knew, guessed, or served as some kind of "channel" of unknowable information. I think that is part of the enchantment of this book.

I recommend reading this book. It does not take too long, and is thoroughly enjoyable.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Richard Bowes

History I'm Old Enough To Remember

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 25, 2008

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Ford's Long Island is one I knew when I lived there in the early 1960's. The novel shows it to me again - the towns sprung up in what had been potato fields, the communities made up entirely of newcomers. His description of a flea-bitten circus that's pitched its tents on a mud flat in Farmingdale is dead-on. I may have seen it on the same day the author did.

In those suburbs, the family was everything. The one depicted, with an alcoholic mother, a father working three jobs and a pair of grand-parents slowly fading out of the picture, is what would now be called dysfunctional. What Ford does brilliantly is to show how the kids, the narrator who is in sixth grade, his slightly older brother and somewhat younger sister, are thrown onto their own resources, forced into a tight bond, in the face of danger.

And dangers exist in what was supposed to be a paradise free of all the problems of the big cities. Early on in the book a pederast is busted, the main plot line concerns a killer who stalks the neighborhood. It's here that Ford depicts as well as I've seen it done, the tension and fear of a kid with dreadful knowledge he is unable to communicate to any adult.

The novel has a mystery and a ghost. It also has in abundance, the sights, the sounds, the smells and the feel of the early stages of the greatest social experiment of this nation in my lifetime.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kate C.

Well crafted

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 30, 2018

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A really well crafted story. It proceeds slowly and with a great deal of humor intertwined in the plot, which somehow makes the scary parts even creepier. I would have given it five stars but the ending felt like the editor told the author to "hurry up and finish the book".
The book will certainly transport any reader back to the days of childhood. In fact, at certain points, I wondered if the scary things were happening or if they were the result of kids need to make up adventures, as my cousin and I did during those long summer days between school years or when we had the thrill of Halloween on the horizon, of course as the story proceeds it is clear there is something lurking around town. This is a great summer or Autumn read.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Anne Brunstrøm

Fine

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2013

Verified Purchase

The book arrived quickly and in perfect shape so I have nothing to complain about or to say about this order. The book itself is the best novel I've read for half a year.

Jane Mitchell

A less Gory Stephen King

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

Excellent. Like a less gory Stephen King. Loved the quirky yet real family

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The Shadow Year: A Novel Paperback – Bargain Price, March 17, 2009

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