The books of elsewhere: The shadows

The books of elsewhere: The shadows

By Jacqueline West, ill. Poly Bernatene

This book is a Texas Bluebonnet Award Nominee for 2012.

Old Ms. McMartin died alone in her ancient stone house and was only discovered much later because of the howling of her three huge cats. After the authorities were done taking care of the necessities, the house went up for sale for an astonishingly low price. Two typically distracted mathematicians, Mr. and Mrs. Dunwoody, with their eleven year old daughter Olive, moved in soon after a quick tour of the premises, and settled in to their normal routine of teaching and studying. Except the daughter was on summer vacation and decided to explore the curious old house.

The most disconcerting thing about the house at first was the many old paintings on the walls everywhere. They seemed to be watching the people in the house, and to draw the observer in to themselves somehow. Olive soon found out that they not only could not be taken down, they couldn’t even be moved at all, as if they were part of the walls. And it seemed that there was a presence following her wherever she went in the house.

Unable to fall asleep, Olive looked out the window of her room and a large cat in the tree outside opened the window and came into the room. He introduced himself as Horatio, and soon informed her that something in the house was trying to get rid of her family, that it did not really belong to them even though they had bought it. Horatio warned her to beware.

In her wandering through the rooms of the old house, Olive found many strange articles, one of which was a pair of spectacles which she liked to try on. She noticed that when she looked at the paintings with the spectacles on, they looked different, more real. In fact, she could put her hand through them. So, she decided to try to go into one of them.

Although Horatio warned her, she managed to go into many of the paintings and find strange people there, some of whom followed her out. She eventually met two other cats, Harvey and Leopold, who, with Horatio, were the guardians of the house. In her adventures, Olive and the three cats activated the spirit of the house’s evil builder, old Aldous McMartin, who had been lost in a painting along with his daughter Annabelle, the one who had owned the house before the Dunwoodys bought it.

The two spirits combined powers to prevent Olive from binding them into a painting, thus causing them to lose the house forever. But in spite of their great age and strength, Olive outsmarted them with the help of the three cats, destroyed the ancient spirit of Aldous McMartin forever with the power of light against his darkness, and banned the evil Annabelle to a painting they buried in the back yard.

One of the major literary strengths of this book were the unexpected insights of the paintings becoming real places when viewed through a different perspective, thus allowing Olive to enter that perspective to gain information about the house and its former occupants. The other literary strength was the convention that good always wins over bad, so no matter how hopeless the situation Olive was in might seem, the promise of a good ending was glimmering just around the corner, past the picture frame.

West, J., & Bernatene, P. (2010). The books of elsewhere: The shadows. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.