Reviews for Shadowed Summer

Awards & Recognition

March 2009 - Junior Library Guild Selection

May 2009 - ALAN Pick

November 2009 - BCCB Guide Book to Gift Books

November 2009 - Atlanta Parent Magazine "50 Must-Read Books"

November 2009 - Cybils Nominee - MG/YA Fantasy-Science Fiction

January 2010 - Edgar® Award Nominee, YA Category

April 2010 - The Society of Midland Authors Book Award Winner, Children's Fiction.

June 2010 - VOYA 2010 Summer Reading List



Mystery Scene Magazine

Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell is Southern Gothic, with a twist. Iris and her family have come home to the small Louisiana town in the wake of Katrina and its aftermath, and as far as she can tell, there is nothing worth coming home to. Then Elijah appears, a wild spirit, perhaps a ghost? Iris has to find out what happened 14 years ago, to set Elijah free from his earthly presence. The answer reveals a family secret that has festered for 15 years or more. Plenty of atmosphere, and a persistent young sleuth make this a riveting tale. -Roberta Rogow



The Horn Book Guide, Fall, 2009

YA Fourteen-year-old Iris resigns herself to another boring summer in Ondine, Louisiana, where the only excitement is playing at seances. Make-believe becomes all too real when long-missing Elijah begins haunting her. Elijah's attention becomes malevolent, and Iris and friends must uncover their town's dark past. A Southern gothic sensibility adds a chill to this sweltering Louisiana mystery. (3)



Midwest Book Review, 05/09

Saundra Mitchell's SHADOWED SUMMER (9780385735711, $15.99) tells of a Louisiana summer where Iris is fourteen and discovers a ghost is haunting her. What really happened to Elijah - and how can she thwart his haunting ways? A fine, spirited story evolves.



School Library Journal, 04/09

Set in a small town in Louisiana, this novel revolves around superstitions, hauntings, and badly buried secrets. Iris, 14, plans to spend the summer with her friend Collette, casting spells and calling up ghosts in the local cemetery. The girls know they don't have mystical powers, but they enjoy the game- until Iris sees the ghost of a boy who asks her, Where y'at Iris?" Convinced that he is the spirit of Elijah, a local boy gone missing a generation before, Iris sets out to uncover the truth of his disappearance. The ghost begins to terrorize her, and the town becomes angry at her digging into the past. Then Ben, whom Collette likes, joins them, causing friction between the girls. The novel climaxes with Iris awakening from a terrifying dream, certain of where Elijah is buried. Her discovery uncovers years of secrets hidden by her father, who was Elijah's best friend. Mitchell packs a lot into this novel; on the periphery of the story are hints of suicide, homosexuality, and spousal abuse that give complexity to the secondary characters living in this small town. Suggest this one to readers who like a supernatural twist to their coming-of-age stories. -Caroline Tesauro, Radford Public Library, VA



Hellnotes, 3/7/09

Adolescent angst leads to supernatural suspense set in the sultry South in Shadowed Summer. In this poignant and evocative tale, two girls in their early teens are catapulted into a decades old mystery. The boredom they feel from living in a very small town leads them to unwittingly unleash an unquiet spirit. The ghost haunts Iris, the novel's first person narrator. As Iris and her best friend Collette try to understand and deal with the haunting, their friendship is tested. The strain of growing up, getting a crush on the same guy, and trying to lay a revenant to rest are tough burdens for such small shoulders. Author Saundra Mitchell writes of the pains of transition and teen trauma with a keen and shrewd understanding. This young adult ghost story has an appeal beyond its target market.

In the town of Ondine, population of around 300, there are secrets and unresolved emotions. People are closed and closeted when queried about Elijah, a young man who disappeared in the 1980s. Iris becomes suspicious and frustrated when she realizes her father was a school friend of the missing boy, and yet won't be candid about their relationship. Elijah's ghost becomes more aggressively persistent, wreaking emotional havoc on Iris: "He threw my spellbook toward me, and its white pages rose and fell like a bird's wings before it landed silently in my lap. The book flipped over and spread itself open again. A red drop splattered in the middle of the page, and I reached up to scrub at my nose as the blood smear crawled across the page and formed neat block letters." This is a particularly chilling passage since Elijah was said to suffer from nosebleeds. It is an eerie element, and a disarmingly different application of the overused message written in blood.

Shadowed Summer is certainly written for young adults. Its focus and concerns are about them. Saundra Mitchell respects her youthful readers, and comprehends the complexities of their time of life. In doing so, she also has created a novel that is not bound by an age group or by demographics. Who doesn't remember their first kiss or feeling the dread of change and yet, simultaneously, the desire for it? This spectral story is insightful and eloquent; the ache of youth is remarkably rendered. -Sheila Merritt



Booklist, 2/15/09

This heady mix of ghost story and mystery, drenched in the languid, humid atmosphere of a small Louisiana town, should appeal to the core audience of the Twilight series: adolescent girls who like a little sexiness in their ghostly pursuers. Ennui can get people into all sorts of trouble, and the kind of blank summer days staring down 14-year-old Iris and her friends lead them to casting spells in the town cemetery. A masculine whisper in Iris' ear shoots them into true ghost-hunting, with a Ouija board indicating that the whisperer belongs to the town's only mystery, a 17-year-old boy who disappeared almost 20 years ago. Mitchell skillfully segues from gothic romance to prosaic mystery as the friends examine microfiche records and question the boy's relatives and friends. As the ghost becomes increasingly insistent that his mystery be solved, Iris discovers unnerving connections to her own family. Highly atmospheric, with pulse-pounding suspense and an elegiac ending. -Connie Fletcher



The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, 2/09
Recommended

"Where y'at, Iris?" whispers a ghost into Iris' ear, and suddenly, fourteen-year-old Iris' enduring game of spirit-hunting with her friend Collette takes on a frightening reality. Throughout the steamy summer in their small Louisiana town of Ondine, the friends, aided by Collette's crush and maybe boyfriend Ben, try to unravel the secret of the ghost who appears to Iris. When it becomes clear that it's the spirit of Elijah Landry, who disappeared without a trace in 1989 when he was seventeen and whose fate still mystifies the town, the trio decides they must solve the mystery of Elijah's end in order to set him to rest. Mitchell sets out in an assured fashion right from the start, conjuring up a credible picture of a small-town populace with complicated layers of interrelationships past and present underlying the cozy everyday familiarity. Iris is skillfully drawn: she's a good girl who runs benignly wild as the only child of a widowed father working the night shift, and the book hits the right notes in her slightly rocky friendship with the tempestuous Collette and her growing acceptance of Ben. The ghostly details are genuinely shivery, and the author teases readers enjoyably with credible teen fakeouts amid the real, genuinely creepy, if unthreatening manifestations. While the truth of Elijah's end is a little shopworn, there's enough context to make it more than random, and he remains a tantalizingly enigmatic figure even after his mystery is solved. Good ghost stories are, like ghosts, a little thin on the ground in these times, and readers will be pleased to find this atmospheric reaffirmation of a good haunting. -DS



JLG Monthly, March 2009

An atmospheric mystery with a finely drawn Louisiana setting, Shadowed Summer manages to be consistently creepy without ever becoming a horror story.

Elijah's disappearance from Ondine has left its mark on the town and Saundra Mitchell takes care to show how the weight of Elijah's secret bears down upon Iris's neighbors and loved ones, ensuring that Elijah's moody presence is felt even when his ghost is absent. The theme of lost loved ones is echoed my Iris's memories of her late mother, made more urgent and real by Elijah's return.

At the heart of the novel is a series of interconnected love triangles, all touching Iris and pervaded by the closeness of small-town life. Iris competes with Collette for their neighbor Ben's attention while Elijah invades Iris's dreams as Ben's double. Elijah's relationships in his own time were left unresolved, and Iris can only lay him to rest by addressing the unfinished business haunting the people he loved and left behind.

Iris provides much of the book's appeal. She is an independent daydreamer whose hardworking father and newly boy-crazy best friend leave her feeling lonely just when she needs other people the most. Iris's occasional stubbornness motivates much of the novel's plot, keeping her from reconciling with friends or asking for help when she most needs it.

Mitchell does a masterful job with Iris's narrative voice, finding just the right mixture of naivete, brashness, disbelief and panic. The resolution of the mystery will leave readers satisfied, while the mood of this splendid novel will stay with readers for a long time.



Kirkus Reviews, 1/1/09

Iris and Collette, best friends with plans to get out of their sleepy little Louisiana town as soon as they can drive, find themselves faced with some unexpected challenges in the summer of their 15th year. Although they have created and collected "spells" for as long as they can remember, neither of them is prepared for the bona fide supernatural experience of a real ghost. It haunts Iris, pursuing her until she, with some help from Collette, solves the town's most significant mystery-the disappearance of Elijah Landry, a boy who vanished from his bedroom one night, leaving drops of blood behind on his pillow. The tension strains Iris and Collette's friendship, as does the presence of Collette's first love interest, Ben Duvall, which introduces jealousy from every direction. While teen readers will appreciate the suspenseful plot and the tragic story of what happened to Elijah, they may well be put off by main characters who seem either incredibly naive or a couple of years shy of their supposed 14. (Horror. 12 & up)