The Shadow Year

The Shadow Year is set on Long Island in the mid 1960s and told by a boy in the sixth grade who never gives his name. His father works three jobs and is rarely home; his mother drinks herself to sleep most nights. He spends his days with his older brother, Jim, and their younger sister, Mary, who is strange, brilliant with numbers, and sometimes lives as an imaginary boy called Mickey. In the basement Jim has built Botch Town, a scale model of their neighborhood with a figure for each of the people in it.

Then things start to go wrong. A classmate, Charlie Edison, disappears. A prowler is seen at windows. A menacing man in a white car, whom the children call Mr. White, seems to be following the narrator around the neighborhood and the school, and after a blizzard an old man, Mr. Barzita, is found dead. Most unsettling of all, Mary has begun moving the figures in Botch Town, and what she arranges in the basement keeps showing what will happen in the streets before it happens. The three children set out to catch Mr. White themselves, using Mary's numbers and her model as their map. Ford does eventually reveal who the man in the white car is, but not why he fixed on the narrator, and much of what the children see and overhear is never explained.

This is a slow, remembering kind of book, closer to a childhood memoir with a shadow across it than to a thriller, and the pleasure is in the detail: the ice cream truck, the school bully, the loving but broken parents seen clearly by children who cannot yet judge them. Kirkus found it "properly creepy" and at times "deliciously funny." Readers who want a mystery that builds to a big climax may feel shortchanged; Publishers Weekly complained that the story "peters out." Readers who grew up on Ray Bradbury, or on Stephen King's novels of childhood, will know the territory and enjoy the visit.