Book review: 'The Shadows' heroine shows bravery in other world
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Whether by wardrobe, tollbooth, tesseract or rabbit hole, fictional children are always finding ways to enter different, often troubled, worlds. And in the extraordinary way of children, once these young champions are aware of suffering they set out to make things right without a second thought.
Although they may get scared and frustrated, they never give up. Olive Dunwoody of "The Books of Elsewhere. Volume 1: The Shadows" (Dial, $11.55, ages 8-12) is one such heroine.
Eleven-year-old Olive has lived in small apartments her entire life. They all had comfortingly identical beige walls set at perfect 90-degree angles. However, Olive has to leave her generic world behind when her kooky mathematician parents spontaneously buy the old, decrepit stone house on Linden Street.
Uprooted, Olive thinks that the house is dark, crumbly and weird. Her logical, scientifically minded parents wouldn't understand, but Olive has the distinct feeling that the house is up to no good.
She doesn't like the way shadows lurk in its many corners or the squeaking, moaning sounds it makes at night. She especially doesn't like the paintings that line the walls of her new home. They aren't your garden-variety landscapes, portraits and still-lifes. There is something else lurking in the paintings, something bad that Olive can't quite see.
Olive, a lonely child, spends a lot of time exploring her new home. She stumbles across all kinds of oddities: fans, handkerchiefs, jewelry and other relics left by the house's mysterious previous owner.
In a chest of drawers she finds a pair of old-fashioned spectacles. When she puts them on, the woman in the portrait above the dresser winks at Olive.
In fact, all of the paintings in the house come to life when seen through the lenses of the magical spectacles. And that's not all the spectacles do, as Olive abruptly realizes when she tumbles through the canvas and into the painting of a forest at night.
In that forest she meets Morton, a little boy who insists he is real. But he is clearly made of paint and brush strokes. Like all of the painting people, Morton is scared of someone, but he can't or won't say who.
First Published October 5, 2010 12:00 am
