359 pages
Published 2022
Read from October 24 to October 27
Rating: 3 out of 5
This is a crisp and efficient mashup of Gothic and eldritch horror, polished to a glossy YA sheen.
Our narrator, Helen Vaughan, has unexpectedly been named heir to Harrowstone Hall, a labyrinthine manor house guarding cosmic secrets. Her ancestor Nicholas Vaughan had it built to trap something he should never have meddled with. The Hall exerts a strange pull over heirs of the Vaughan family. Helen stumbles through its extradimensional mysteries and social interactions with equal awkwardness. Unfortunately for her, plenty of people in her extended family don’t think she should be the heir.
I think one reason this didn’t quite click for me is the disconnect between the gravity of Helen’s encounters with otherworldly horrors, dark gods, and murderous relatives, and the breezy just-like-you narration. It feels like the cast of a teen rom-com got dragooned into a Gothic horror novel. (It makes sense in the end, but that’s still about 300 pages of tonal mismatch to get through.)
The members of the extended Vaughan family get introduced all in a bunch in an early scene; none of them ever quite establish themselves as distinct characters. Rumors of a folkloric figure called the Harrow Witch reach Helen, and then the Witch immediately gets revealed to be Bryony, the teenage daughter of the de facto groundskeeper. The result is a flattened story, something that could be quite cool and interesting but instead mostly goes through the motions and gives its protagonists neither dimension nor danger.
It's as if Shadows takes a checklist for how to structure your YA novel, and proceeds through it sharply and professionally, but never deviates from it. You have your troubled teen with a mysterious past. She gets pulled into an even more mysterious and dangerous situation. An unknown enemy doesn't want her there, but she also meets a new friend who is fast with a quip. She meets an intriguing wildcard character who doesn't like her at first, but gradually softens and gives her a pet nickname. There’s a race to uncover dangerous family secrets. Helen herself is more than she seems. And so on and so forth.
Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means. As an awkward and plausibly autistic person who’s always struggled with social dynamics, I found Helen appealing enough as a protagonist. The use of bones, too, was a nice narrative and thematic continuity, creative and creepy. The second half, once the mountain of table-setting had been done, is so much better than the first. The denouement outright kicks ass.
But much like with The Hazel Wood, I think I’m just not the target audience here, and that’s okay. I don’t think you have to be an actual teen to appreciate Shadows, but it would help if you were a bigger fan of YA.
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