READING: Jeffrey Ford's THE SHADOW YEAR

I assume that everyone who reads this blog reads Jeffrey Ford. No!? Go read this and come back when you're done. I'll wait. OK, you have some sort of idea of the type of fiction of which Mr. Ford is capable.

In THE SHADOW YEAR we follow an unnamed narrator, his older brother Jim, and their younger sister Mary through the events of one Summer during the 1960s. A prowler has appeared on their street, causing consternation for the adults, but excitement for the narrator and his siblings as they finally are able to fill their Summer with something: they are going to discover the identity of the prowler. At the same time, the chilcren take note of a mysterious white car driving quietly around their neighborhood late at night.

The boys build a model of their home town in the basement, which they dub Botchtown. The narrator begins constructing stories about Botchtown's inhabitants, Jim adds more details to the people and homes in the model, and Mary... Mary moves the pieces around when the boys aren't around. It doesn't seem random; after she correctly predicts the future location of the prowler and white car, the boys actively want her to help.

As with any Ford piece, the prose is lucid and easy. Even the most complicated topics sound simple coming off Ford's pen. And there's a depth to his writing that is practically unparalleled. While the story moves along and the boys try to uncover the identity of the prowler and the driver of the white car, Ford paints an uneasy family portrait: the boys' father is working several jobs and the family is barely scraping by; the mother drinks herself to sleep most nights; the grandparents live above the garage in an apartment; and the boys have to deal with bullies and pranks at school. As a reader, you're torn between wanting to learn more about the family and wanting to solve the mystery. In a lesser writer's hands, this would be distracting, but for Ford, it just flows naturally.

And everything is told through the eyes of a nine- or ten-year-old boy's eyes. You never forget that it's his voice that's telling the story. So you have his sense of wonder when seeing things for the first time, his terror at events that are mundane to adults, and his unquestioning belief in the strength of his own family. He knows things aren't right, but he loves it all the same.

The only potential drawback the book had for me was that I felt the ending sort of just happened. It felt, open-ended, almost unresolved. However, I look at it as a reflection on real life. Real life doesn't tie itself up neatly; real life has all sorts of things happening and nothing comes to a solid conclusion.

This isn't a book you read for the ending, this is a book you read for the journey.