Shadow Girl

Reviewed by: Noelle Gallant - Saco Middle School, Saco, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: January 9, 2018

Review

Readers who come to this book looking for a horror story will be sorely disappointed. There is a ghost mentioned about three times within the course of the 324 story, but she's inconsequential and really doesn't seem to matter to the story as a whole. If the author had chosen instead to focus on the main character's experience working as an academic tutor for a strange girl in a dysfunctional family, the book would have been more successful.

I had a few other problems with the author's craft. The main character's name (Mei) doesn't seem to appear in the first hundred pages of the book, which made me, as a reader, feel disconnected to her. Also, she has a rich culture in her family - lots of references to her mother's cooking and breaks in the text for her mother's language, but I was never clear on what this language and culture were. It added confusion to a story that already seemed disjointed. The book's jacket is selling us a horror story, but what we are really getting here is a story about a very intelligent, ambitious young woman working as an academic tutor amidst a family with a lot of problems.

Final thought - there was a trompe-l'oeil effect in the font. At times. the font appeared to be bold, though there wasn't a discernable reason why. Occasionally, Mei's mother's speech seems to appear in bold, but I couldn't tell if it was a trick of the eyes or a legitimate effect the author was attempting. This took me out of the story fairly often during reading.

Overall Book Score: fair