Shadow Baby

Once you are able to suspend disbelief—that an 11-year old could be quite as precocious as Clara—this is an engaging story. Clara’s main goal is to discover who her father and grandfather are and why her twin sister died at birth. Her mother Tamar won’t answer these questions. As a consequence, Clara, a born storyteller, invents tales to satisfy her imagination; that her grandfather is a hermit in the Appalachian woods for instance. Much of Clara’s tales stem from her reading of such stories as The Little House in the Prairie series. Clara also befriends an old man, Georg, who lives in a trailer. Initially, she plans to interview him for a school project: Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant is how she thinks of him. When Georg declines to answer her probing queries, she invents a back history for him too, and often can’t recall what is true and what she has invented. Tragically, Georg died in a fire trying to save Clara (who thinks Georg is in the trailer) and ultimately Clara’s questions are answered, though not as she had envisioned. The voice that McGhee invests Clara with is genuinely enchanting.

Just finished this book and my heart is still warmed, but breaking from this tender, quirky story. I have to admit that it took me a while to get caught up in the writing style (the voice of an unusual 11-year-old) but suddenly I realized that this little girl became real to me. She became a memorable character and I found myself holding my breath often during her poignant insights. I ended up loving this book.

This was a wonderful, heartfelt book with an utterly engaging eleven year old narrator that I wanted to welcome into my home. An excellent read.

Very different read.

I wasn't sure I would like this book but I did. A story about loss and questions that need answers for a young girl, that has stories and words in her head that she needs because no one will give her answers when she asks. Its a quirky read, but everything makes sense in the end. It brought tears to my eyes and I'm glad I kept reading.

The synopsis kind of goes like this:

Meet Clara winter (yep, ‘winter’ is her last name). She hates winter, so she hates spelling her name with a capital ‘w’. She’s an eleven-year old girl who lives with her mother of iron will, Tamar, in their humble settlement in some kind of a mountainous place (with frequent snowfall during winter). Clara loves reading books, particularly those that tell the (hi)story of the pioneers, and lusts for words that aren’t used or spoken often. Because of her love for knowing, she starts making up her own theories or stories as to what might have happened to the pioneers. Thus, her school book reports were filled with, well, made-up books that she just imagined. Her teachers would easily be fooled because of her convincing summaries, which were backed up with fake publisher details that sound real. She’s a smart kid like that.

(That kind of ended up a character introduction, huh? Okay, moving on!)

One day she discovers an old man who seems to be good at metalworking. She decides to interview this old man, Georg (not George) Kominsky, for her oral history project. Perfect. From their meeting, an unusual friendship is gradually being formed. Though the old man was chary with words, Clara’s wild imagination, unending inquisitiveness, and a good grasp of timing when and when not to say anything to the old man were handy in maintaining a peaceful atmosphere whenever the two are together, in the trailer truck home of his. While learning about the life and lifestyle of the old man in little snippets, and even becoming his apprentice in ‘seeing the possibility out of anything’ (i.e. how to make something out of a metal scrap by evaluating what it can become–a ‘second life’ of a material thrown away by someone else), Clara invents his past, because she hates NOT knowing.

But if Clara is really knowledgeable on a lot of things–especially in the past and those that have to do with the pioneers–and has an incredible grasp of trivial things, she wouldn’t have had to be bothered with her own shadowy past. Apparently, she had a a twin sister who didn’t make it alive after they were born one stormy winter night. That’s everything she knows at one point. Because her mother Tamar, who is inarguable, won’t tell her all the details despite her constant inquiry, Clara winter also imagines what happened that fateful night.

Will she truly unfold the truth? How will she take the truth? Were she to blame anyone, anything? the damned weather? the damned mistakes?

So, that’s how I think the story went. I honestly got bored reading it until (roughly) the 100-page mark. The narrative seems to jump from place to place. Its flow was hard to follow for an irregular and newbie reader like me, especially so since the setup took long to finally sink in to my feeble mind. Nonetheless, when I had a stronger image of the story and the characters, things began to look interesting and I was able to sit longer with it. It took me a few months (two and half, I think?) to finally finish it, though. I think I read the last third of it in just two days–really fast than when I was just starting on it. And I think that change in reading pace reflects the change in pace in storytelling, too. All of a sudden, more truths were being uncovered and the characters became more driven and resolute with their decisions, which would eventually lead to more heart-breaking and mind-boggling (for me, at least) events. These made everything at the beginning somewhat dull, but nonetheless good for the appreciation of this heart-racing scenes at the end.

Overall, the story and characters are nothing short of ordinary. Everyone in this book, while they were given varying degrees of importance, of course, had his/her own story. These side stories didn’t appear annoying in the least or like blots of ink in this beautiful book, even if I didn’t really get a better understanding and sometimes saw them as unnecessary parts. The characters felt real and were just like people who we’re likely to meet in personal, too. The conflicts may have been petty, if anything, but it was lovable of the cast to be living their lives and actually being worried over these things that say a lot about their personalities. Nothing’s really special with the plot in retrospect, but it’s the writing that made it so special for me at the same time. This book just left me in awe, deep inside wanting for more, but I have been convinced of the satisfying ending. Strangely, it left with a fuzzy feeling inside, much like what The Giver did after I read the last sentences.

Maybe the messy manner of storytelling helped in giving off this kind of effect to me. That the scattered plots were just meant to be connected as I approached the denouement. It’s much similar to how it is in life. We can’t figure out everything, or all the details, at once but, instead, learn to appreciate the bigger picture of it and just how everything seems to just work, without our prior knowledge of what every part was supposed to play.

Rating: 4/5 – really liked it

I think I’d really love to read this again, but not anytime soon. I’ll let this feeling sink in, and let myself crave for this book sometime in the future.

Have you ever read the Anne of Green Gables series? I'll bet the author has. The girl in this book is just like Anne Shirley. She even talks the same way, and the relationship she forms with an old man is very Anne Shirley like too. This precocious girl with no real friends, befriends someone her grandpa's age while she also obsesses over a family secret about her dead twin sister. A lot of things could have improved if the people in this book were open with each other. It is a good story, I really liked this girl and her stories. I never fit in either, and was constantly making up things in my head, so i identified with her a lot. Cute but with a sad end.

This was a pretty good read about an 11-year-old trying to figure out life. Clara is precocious and inquisitive, I found her interesting and endearing. She befriends an elderly neighbor, Georg Kominsky, only to find out that he is illiterate. As she attempts to fill in the missing pieces of her life (she has a twin who died at birth, her mother refuses to reveal her father's identity) she learns more about his life as well.