Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell

[meganbmoore]

Sometimes, I think I am the only woman in LJ-land who is over twenty and did not read what seems to have been copious amounts of L.J. Smith and/or V.C. Andrews. I vaguely remember reading a bit of each in my early teens, but did not imprint on them the way many seem to have. I’m not sure why I bring that up, save that I thought about it many times while I was reading Shadowed Summer.

Iris and her friend Collette are fourteen and trying to keep themselves busy during a lazy Louisiana summer, their longtime friendship being complicated by Collette’s discovery of hormones. They keep themselves busy by talking about how they’ll one day escape the town, and by creating rituals to raise the dead. Eventually Ben, the subject of Collette’s raging hormones, is also brought into their very small circle, though his family’s old ouija board had at least as much to do with it as hormones.

Soon, Iris unintentionally brings a boy of her own, Elijah, into the mix. The problem? Elijah disappeared around twenty years ago, is believed dead, and is one of the town’s local legends. I will now steal from sarahtales's much more entertaining post on the book, as she sums up how this goes down:

IRIS: So we totally accidentally raised the dead.
COLLETTE: Iris, you are talking crazy. I know from crazy, and you are talking it!
IRIS'S BEDROOM: erupts into poltergeist activity
COLLETTE (ducking a lamp): There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this!
BEN: No, I'm pretty sure we accidentally raised the dead.
COLLETTE: QUIET YOU.
BEN: Momma said sometimes girls could be kind of highly strung.
COLLETTE: QUIET EVERYBODY, INCLUDING YOU, MR GHOST, SINCE YOU DO NOT EVEN EXIST!
IRIS: I think we need to sit down and think up a nice reasonable plan for dealing with our ghost problem.
BEN: ... I like your down-to-earth ways.
IRIS: Oh, Ben. I'm pretty much just using you for your ouija board.

It’s a ghost story, obviously, and a wonderfully atmospheric one at that, but it’s also about first love and friendship, and about prejudice and acceptance. I love Iris’s down-to-earth-ness, and how the friendship of the girls is much more important than hormones, and how Iris’s reaction to her own hormones is “yes, well, I guess you’re kinda cute in that weird way that sometimes happens once you can get acne, and you might be cuter, but you kissed my best friend first, so you just have cooties.”

Comments

[the_rck]

I was born in 1967 and have only read a few pages of V.C. Andrews. Flowers in the Attic was hugely popular when I was in middle school, but I couldn't read it. I just couldn't. I don't think I ever tried L.J. Smith. I think I might be too old and simply have missed the books, but I'm not sure. When did her stuff start coming out?

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, but I remember he books being everywhere in the early 90s.

[the_rck]

I finished high school in 1985. After that, I would likely not have seen them. That makes me suspect that I mainly just missed them. I don't remember them on the shelves at the local public library, and I'd probably have read them because the library was small enough that I was starved for anything even remotely SF/fantasy related.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Born in 1975, read the entire Flowers series, probably in part because they were at the school library and I could read them without checking them out.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I never read either! I remember everyone I knew reading VC Andrews, though.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember everyone reading them, and I still see posts on them all the time, usually rereads, but...

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I read V.C. Andrews in junior high, maybe two of the books, but didn't enjoy them enough to seek out more. I was too busy trying to read my way through the entire fiction section of the school library.

As for L.J. Smith, I had to look the books up on Amazon to see what they were and none of them looked the least bit familiar so I'm going to go with 'never read them'.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think I was busy discovering romance novels and fantasy novels when everyone else started reading them. Also, I read almost every Victoria Holt book that I could find.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I spent a disturbing amount of time in Junior High reading 'Sweet Valley High' and 'The Girls of Canby Hall' novels but never really got into romance and didn't start really reading fantasy or science fiction until high school.

[curlyjo1.livejournal.com]

I read Flowers in the Attic, and was rather squicked by it. A friend informed me that it had a common theme with the rest of her books, and I didn't bother to read any more.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think I read that one.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, from what I've heard she definitely had a theme and stuck with it.

[cavechan.livejournal.com]

I've never read any LJ Smith nor VC Andrews. Then again, I'm not too big on the kind of books that don't have any pictures. =\

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm big on anything that I can read that doesn't bore me or make me mad.

[cavechan.livejournal.com]

I noticed. 8D

I'm just a really slow reader. So I start stuff and then never finish them. >_> I have a couple books that I'm still working on. I just shouldn't read ones that are 400 pages. o__O

[sureasdawn.livejournal.com]

Nope, haven't read either of them, so you're not alone. :D My early teens were eaten up reading mainly Tamora Pierce, Lackey, Le Guin, McKinley and Jacques. Repeatedly. I think I've read The Earthsea Cycle and The Hero and the Crown about four hundred times now, and I still have some Redwall fanart I made when I was about thirteen. XD

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Ditto on all but Pierce and Jacques. I didn't hear about Pierce until recently, and never got into Redwall, though my brother had all the books.

[sureasdawn.livejournal.com]

It still baffles me that I found some of these authors, but never read any Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia McKillip or Lois McMaster Bujold, until I was in my late twenties. I shudder to think what other lovelies I've yet to discover and lament the time we should have already had together.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I'm 31 and I remember all of my friends reading V. C. Andrews. I looked at the backs, kind of twitched and put them back down. Of course, I wasn't even into Stephen King, so I was pretty much an outlier among my friends.

The summary is hilarious and sounds much more harmless than V. C. Andrews, which I recall involved incest and whatnot. Ick.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It's not 100% wholesome in the "traditional family values" sense, but it doesn't have all the stuff that I only acceptin Kaori Yuki and Higuri You manga.

[estara.livejournal.com]

I do know that V.C. Andrews was translated into German, but I never heard about L.J. Smith before LJ. I'm 42 myself and have read neither.

In my LATE teens, early 20s I did read Lackey, Kinley, Tolkien, Eddings, Feist. At the time I was already able to read in English. My first attempt at that was the Dark is Rising books by Susan Cooper, which I just recommended to a bright pupil of mine last week ^^. And so the wheel turns..

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think Andrews was translated into everything.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Read neither, and I'm 27. Like the others, I was reading SFF in my early teens :) That and Agatha Christie.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I love how a person can see posts on a subject at least once a week (in this case, the 2 authors) but when they comment on it, it's just a flood of "yeah, not into it either."

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Oh, I devoured Agatha Christie. Years later I read a book by someone-- sadly, it escapes me-- where one of the leads kept reading Christies and wouldn't realize it was a re-read until halfway through and I knew exactly what they were talking about and it was pretty awesome.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Over twenty here, and I haven't read either. They didn't look interesting when I was a teen, I guess, though I remember seeing them.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The weird thing is that I do know that i did read R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike.

Then again, the Junior High library always had about 20 of each in stock, and I could go through about 2 a day.

[bzoppa.livejournal.com]

I'm a little worried about you putting L.J. Smith and V.C. Andrews in the same sentence.

I read all of them, but I think I'm a little older than you are. V.C. Andrews was in her heyday (and still alive) when I was about 12-13. The movie Flowers in the Attic came out when I was about 10 and that's when I read those.

Petals on the Wind was the first book with really really graphic sex, I read it the summer before fifth grade. I was so shocked I read it all in one day, heh.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction to sex in a book at about the same age. Though with me, it was Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Wolf and the Dove.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

I'm 22, and have never read either!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

The book sounds awesome. I never read any L.J. Smith. Don't think I've ever heard of her!

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It is very awesome!