Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell (Book Review by Melissa A. Bartell)
Shadowed Summer
by Saundra Mitchell
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In Saundra Mitchell’s spooky, sultry YA novel Shadowed Summer we are following protagonist Iris around a post-Katrina Ondine, Louisiana, as she and her friends play at being psychic mediums, collect “spells” in spiral notebooks, and play with Ouija Boards in graveyards, even managing to raise a real ghost, but as entertaining as the supernatural element in this story is, it’s the natural parts that are more compelling.
Iris lives along with her widowed father, in a town so small it doesn’t even have a library, and while she is fourteen, she’s still very much a kid feeling a bit left behind as her best friend begins to mature a bit faster, becoming more interested in playing with boys than pretending to hold seances.
Author Mitchell has perfectly captured the slow, sun-soaked Louisiana summer, and the awkwardness of being a fourteen-year-old girl whose closest thing to a mother figure is her gay uncle, who sends her lingerie and make-up catalogs and takes her for one-on-one lunches, but she also manages to maintain the spooky element of the story enough so that even this not-so-young adult reader was compelled to finish it as quickly as possible.
Melissa A. Bartell earns her living by writing articles for an SEO marketing firm, and dabbles in essays and fiction on the side. She lives near Dallas, TX with her husband, two dogs, and more computers than anyone really needs. She is the Managing Editor here at All Things Girl. Find out more about her on our About Page. You can also find her at her website and various other places around the ‘net.
