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The Shadow Year (2008)

de Jeffrey Ford

Altres autors: Mira la secció altres autors.

MembresRessenyesPopularitatValoració mitjanaMencions
3563471,663 (3.89)27
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness--until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police--while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family--all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable--The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.… (més)
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» Mira també 27 mencions

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En 1960, una pequeña comunidad de Long Island se ve afectada por extraños sucesos. Tras las huellas de estos se encuentran un joven y su hermano mayor, Jim, que pasan los últimos días del verano sumergidos en un ambiente asfixiante, con un padre pluriempleado y una madre alcohólica. Un mirón anda suelto por las calles y un hombre observa amenazador a los dos jóvenes desde un coche frente a su casa. Pero cuando un chico del pueblo desaparece sin dejar rastro, ambos tienen claro que el culpable es el señor Blanco. La sorpresa llega cuando descubren que Mary, la hermana pequeña de los chicos, mueve de manera misteriosa figuritas en una maqueta del pueblo, mostrando sucesos antes de que ocurran.
  Natt90 | Jan 20, 2023 |
Overall, 3.5 stars...this was not my favorite Jeffery Ford, but I but I mostly enjoyed the journey. This is a quiet, meandering, vaguely creepy, atmospheric coming of age story where I had no real clue what was going on most of the time, but was still happy to follow along. ( )
  tattooedreader13 | Aug 27, 2020 |
I would be lying if I said this was really a YA novel, but for all normal purposes, it is written from the point of view of a kid in Elementary school and has all the generalized coming of age elements.

However, this is very much for the adults. Nostalgia, sure, harkening back to a small town NY in the early sixties, drawing from all grand features of what I'll call the genre of Epic Grownup Nostalgia with Horror. You've probably seen it around. In A Boy's Life, or SK's IT. Or Stranger Things.

There are a lot of imitators, but the writing in these have to be MAGICAL if it's going to catch my love. This one has a lot of that magic.

Oh, a lot of the mystery revolves around a prowler in the neighborhood and missing children and the strange movements in a town mockup downstairs and his kid sister's strange abilities, but that's all window dressing to some really fantastic outright writing.

I definitely recommend this for you nostalgia fans or younger folk who are curious about what life might have been like, once upon a time, when it was NORMAL to go out with your friends all day long in the neighborhood without supervision.

I know, right? That's some SICK FANTASY, right there! ( )
  bradleyhorner | Jun 1, 2020 |
“Her small stature, dark, and wrinkled complexion, and the silken black strands at the corners of her upper lip made her seem to me at times like some ancient monkey king. When she’d fart while standing, she’d kick her left leg up in the back and say: ‘Shoot him in the pants. The Coat and vest are mine.’”

In “The Shadow Years” by Jeffrey Ford

The world-wide craze for superheroes is obvious. We all see ourselves as passive victims and don't expect to rescue ourselves.

There's also the national craze for vampires and zombies in books, TV, movies, and the web. It may seem odd that a deeply Christian country is also obsessed with vampires, but as Joseph Glanvill wrote in the 1600s, if you deny the existence of demons and witches, you deny god. I see it as another form of projection: a few survivors are surrounded by the dead, i.e., the masses of the unemployed and soon-to-be-unemployable. I’m thinking USA here.

Magical realism is a bit like SF, where colorful, fanciful personas, places and technologies are used to explore all too real attitudes, trends and prejudices. It could be said that Ford's take on it is America's second exploration of the genre, since it was also prevalent in the 50's and 60's (and to some extent the 70's) with the proliferation of pulp magazines, SF publications (also the birth of the modern comic book) and SF movies and TV shows (Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Star Trek). This post war boom was a symptom of America's unease with the new reality of The Bomb, Detente, the Cold War and the Red Menace.

It’s no coincidence that the resurgence of these Magical Realism genres occur at this time, when Americans again feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. American culture has always been hugely imaginative (it's not unique in that, of course) and I see no reason whatsoever why magic realism should be linked to a perceived decline in power.

Unfortunately, many English speakers don't seem to get the fact that magical realism started elsewhere a long time ago: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Gogol, Bulgakov, Garcia Marquez -- one could go on and on. It's these writers who captured the absurdity of so-called reality and the truths revealed by the so-called magic. Ford, in my mind, is the best American representative of this kind of fiction.

Bottom-Line:

1. Reality and fantasy today have changed places. Was the current Presidential election campaign reality, or fantasy? I'd argue that the campaign and our contemporary dilemmas (watching our "leaders" fiddle while Rome burns) is the latter. So it follows that “The Shadow Years” is addressing reality in the oblique, imaginative way that great art does;

2. Using the imagination is hardly a retreat. It's essential. It's our materialist, fact-centred world, suspicious of everything intangible, that is in full-blown retreat from true imaginative art (as opposed to the manipulative products of Hollywood). The American writer Kathleen Norris brilliantly examines what she calls Americans' fear of metaphor -- hence the rise of fundamentalist, literalist religion.

Ford is most of the time literary and beautiful, but this novel bummed me out. Downbeat and offbeat. Unfortunately I am not in the right phase of my life to love this stuff; but it does not prevent me from seeing what Ford was able to do.

Nevertheless, bring on more Beasts, please! ( )
  antao | Aug 3, 2017 |
A boy growing up in the a small Long Island town in the 1960s discovers that a serial killer is stalking his neighborhood.

This is a quirky coming-of-age story with a nostalgic small-town feel and an undercurrent of the sinister, as well as the supernatural. Ford is great with characters, especially the dysfunctional but still affectionate family of the unnamed narrator. The narrator has a hobby of writing little stories about his neighbors, and we get to know them and their eccentricities that way. He and his older brother have also recreated their neighborhood in their basement, a model made out of junk called Botch Town, where their odd younger sister moves the figures in a way that eerily predicts real-life events. The story is a mix of short vignettes about a pivotal year in the boy's life and the ongoing plot of the siblings' efforts to catch Mr. White, a creepy man in a white car who they suspect is murdering people. They have the help of an older neighborhood kid who moved away but mysteriously reappeared. Mixed in are nostalgic stories with a realistic edge: the horrors of middle school; dealing with an alcoholic, depressed mother; the antics of a Halloween night; an exuberant Christmas party; rambling through the nearby woods. There is an epilogue that feels tacked on and probably wasn't necessary, but otherwise this is a little gem of a book. ( )
1 vota sturlington | May 21, 2017 |
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Nom de l'autorCàrrecTipus d'autorObra?Estat
Jeffrey Fordautor primaritotes les edicionscalculat
Collins, Kevin T.Narradorautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat
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For Jim, Mary, and Dool,
whose love was like a light
in the shadow years
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It began in the last days of August, when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn.
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Through the week I would smell a hint of machine oil here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.
I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that's when it happened. There came from outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out.
"What if he gets lost in there?" I said. ¶ "We'll just have everyone in town flush at the same time, and he'll ride the wave out into the sump behind the baseball field," said Jim.
School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer.
He was a short guy with a sharp nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it.
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In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness--until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police--while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement. Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family--all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable--The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.

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