I do enjoy reading Robin McKinley's books. This book was indeed inventive and well written with interesting, believable characters. ( )

It took me a while to get into this book -- something about the intensity of Mckinley's world building can be disorienting, and this book deliberately so. Once I was in, though, there was no putting it down -- there's so many interesting aspects: origami, magic, inter-dimensionality, critters, boys, and family dynamics. Most of all, Maggie herself, authentically 17, more than a little bit confused and swept away by events, and yet deeply kind in a way that makes all her attempts to deal and her fears and her powers and her hopes deeply compelling.

( )

Maggie read a lot like a teenager, which felt accurate, but really, really annoying sometimes. I was still totally hooked until the end, but the stream of consciousness stuff just didn't yield results as good as Sunshine's. ( )

Ever since I read Sunshine I’ve been a fan of McKinley. I loved that book, and I got a lot of echoes of that in this one. The alternate, not-quite-our world. The magic mixed with the mundane.
Shadows is set in an alternate world, one where the Newworld has eradicated all magic, and the risks they feel it brings. Magical families have been gene-spliced and teenagers are regularly tested to ensure that no magic user might slip through. This is a world where the word magician is a bad word. Not like Oldworld, where Maggie’s stepfather is from, there magic and magicians are everywhere.

And from the outset Maggie does not like her stepfather. On their first meeting he creeped her out with the shadows that seemed to loom around him. Has he brought something with him? And if so how did he manage to cross the border?

The female first person central character. The importance of family.

But at the same time it is a very different book, and it probably isn’t fair to compare the two at all. But if you did enjoy Sunshine then you might want to give this a go.

Back to Shadows.

I’d have to say that it took me a while to get into it and its world. I think that it is a book that rewards the time you spend with it. I was reading in quick snatches at first, and I think my experience of the book then suffered, but once I got a bit of time and really got stuck into it I adored it. I love Maggie as a character. She is a teenage girl, one who has lost her father, and who doesn’t like the new man in her mother’s life. All very real and easy to understand. And even before the magic begins to make its presence felt her story was an engrossing one for me.

Also there are dogs and dog care, and origami and paper folding. And boys who may be a romantic interest, or may not. And don’t worry, it never turns into a “love will save the world” sort of story. It is a thread in the plot, not the whole shebang.

But it isn’t as good as Sunshine1 It almost spends too long getting to know Maggie and her dog. And when the magic element does kick off it seems a little rushed. So not a perfect book, but one that I’m glad I read. ( )

This is a strange and weird book, yet oddly compelling. It's also very different than what I've come to expect from Robin McKinley. But if Robin McKinley is going to write an urban fantasy, it will be one hundred percent different and wholly inventive.

There's a learning curve here. You get tossed into this world where magic has been (supposedly) eradicated or tightly controlled in Newworld (aka, the United States), yet still exists outside it. And there are cobeys - breaks in reality where other worlds try to come through. Maggie lives in the town of Station, which normally doesn't have to deal with cobeys, and she lives a fairly normal life until her mom remarries Val, an immigrant who has creepy shadows around him that only she can see.

This world's slang is a bit weird but easy to figure out ('top is laptop, dead battery to show someone is really tired and out of it, etc.). And the world building is a bit of a mishmash - why do some countries have different names, yet Japan is still 'Japan'? for example - and some things aren't fully explained and you just have to go with it. The more immersed I got int the story, the less things like that bothered me.

Thought it took most of the book for me to stop wondering if I liked it or not. But everything came together in the end, and when the book did finish, I wanted more. I want to see more of this world, more of these characters, and to see the new Newworld that comes out of this book.

(And, I liked that the wicked stepfather wasn't so wicked after all.) ( )