Of Swords and Parasols

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.”