Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2010
256 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
When eleven-year-old Olive moves into the crumbling old mansion on Linden Street, she's right to think there's something weird about the place, especially the walls covered in creepy antique paintings. But when she finds a pair of old-fashioned glasses in a dusty drawer, she discovers the most peculiar thing yet--
She can travel inside these paintings to Elsewhere, a world that's strangely quiet ... and eerily sinister.
Olive soon finds that Elsewhere has secrets to hide--and the most annoying of them is Morton, a small boy with a big temper. As he and Olive form an uneasy alliance, Olive finds herself caught in a plan darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. It's up to her to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.
For fans of Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman comes a tale at turns haunting, moving, and darkly funny (and best if read with a flashlight under the bed sheets--shhh!).
"The expressive black-and-white illustrations contribute to the overall spooky mood of the story. The plot moves quickly as Olive pieces together clues." - School Library Journal
"Preoccupied parents, a solitary young girl, talking cats - sound familiar? Unfortunately for debut author West, not only has this been done before, it's been done better." - Kirkus Reviews
"From the first few pages of The Shadows: The Books of Elsewhere, middle grade readers will be hooked on this spooky new series." - Amazon Best Book of the Month
This information about The Shadows was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A two-time Pushcart nominee for poetry, Jacqueline West lives in Chilton, Wisconsin. This is her first novel.
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