True Review : If You Have A Story, We Have You Covered!

Number 75 Vol.19 No.4 June 2010

The Shadow Year:

THE SHADOW YEAR, by Jeffrey Ford. Harper Perennial (www.harperperennial.com), 2009, 291 pp., $14.99. ISBN 978-0-06-123153-7

Around Halloween, the weather in the northeast part of the United States gets rather funky. The days shorten and the nights arrive far too suddenly as the sun’s light falls closer to the earth. The shadows of trees lengthen . . . and things get changeable, eerie. The world becomes even more haunting, out of place.

In the world of one child growing up in Long Island in the early 1960s, those changes are hard to adapt to.

THE SHADOW YEAR gives us a cast of characters: a cynical father; an alcoholic, bipolar mother; and an outlaw neighborhood filled with shadowy foreigners. A white car has a mysterious driver who haunts the streets. And if that isn’t enough, there is the model small town in the basement of a girl’s house, Botch Town, a little “mini-America.” Botch Town is a replica of the town the narrator lives in.

There is the death of a young boy and other craziness that permeates the town. The kid growing up in this has to make sense of it all.

Combine J.D. Salinger, a little bit of the dark writings of Ray Bradbury, with some over-the-top Stephen King and you have a remarkable novel from the writer who brought us THE FANTASY WRITER’S ASSISTANT and EMPIRE OF ICE CREAM.

Andrew M. Andrews

Skinny Bastard - Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

The Intrigue At Highbury - Carrie Bebris

Making Rounds With Oscar - David Dosa, M.D.

WINGS OF FIRE, ed. by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon. Night Shade Books (www.nightshadebooks.com), 2010, 499 pp., $15.95. ISBN 978-1-59780-187-4

Of all these classic tales in the WINGS OF FIRE anthology, it was certainly a lot of fun to read “The Dragon on the Bookshelf” by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. Also, it was a pleasure to look over and read again many of these classic tales, collected as a treasury of the best dragon fiction of our era.

THE ARK, by Boyd Morrison. Touchstone/Fireside/Simon and Schuster (www.simonandschuster.com), 2010, 420 pp., $24.99. ISBN 978-1-4391-8179-9
An archeologist’s father may have found Noah’s Ark, but is missing, with the only clue about his whereabouts coming from a man who dies at Los Angeles Airport – and the quest to find the truth begins.

NEVERLAND by Douglas Clegg. Vanguard Press (www.vanguardpressbooks.com), 2010, 288 pp., $15.95. ISBN 1-59315-541-4. A woodland shack on an island off the southern U.S. coast becomes a forbidden place, a key to an age-old mystery. Kids, of course, find it and are caught up in its mysterious past.

INTO THE WORLD OF MIGHT BE, by W.A. Harbinson. BookSurge Publishing (www.booksurge.com), 2002, 2008, 167 pp., $13.99. ISBN 1-4196-7639-3

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, by Piper Kerman. Spiegel & Grau (www.spiegelandgrau.com), 2010, 298 pp., $25.00. ISBN 978-0-385-52338-7

RECOVERING APOLLO 8 and Other Stories, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Golden Gryphon (www.goldengryphon.com), 2010, 316 pp., $24.95. ISBN 1-930846-62-2

THE GREAT LIFE MAKEOVER, by Daniel A. Monti, MD & Anthony J. Bazzan, MD. HarperCollins Publishers (www.harpercollins.com), 2008, 248 pp., $24.99. ISBN 978-0-06-143540-9

THE DERVISH HOUSE, by Ian McDonald. Prometheus Books (www.pyrsf.com), 2010, 359 pp., $16.00. ISBN 978-1-61614-204-9