Author: Cat Winters (aka Catherine Karp)
Publisher: Abrams
Rating: WORTHY!
Set in the last year of World War One, and during the deadliest pandemic the world has ever seen, In the Shadow of Blackbirds is an atmospheric, rather claustrophobic and unnerving novel about 16-year-old Mary Shelley (not that Mary Shelley, merely a namesake!) and her interesting adventures in San Diego.
Mary is forced to move there after her parents are arrested as German spies. By this neat literary device the author is free to allow Mary to exhibit her (for the time) somewhat scandalous attitudes and even behaviors which her parents would no doubt never countenance.
Mary, who for some reason is always referred to as Mary Shelley, but rarely in full as Mary Shelley Black, stays with her aunt, who happens to be only a decade older than Mary. In some ways Mary is happy to be there because it's the city in which she knew Stephen - a childhood friend who is now fighting in Europe. Stephen writes beautifully and he takes haunting photographs which he titles with anagrams so his older brother Julius will not figure out what the title is. I have no idea why he thinks this was necessary. Two of these pictures he has given to Mary. One is of a butterfly, and its title 'Mr Muse', Mary quickly resolves as 'Summer'. The other is of lightning striking water, and it's titled 'I Do Lose Ink'
Julius is a "spirit photographer" evidently of the kind who double-exposes photographic plates to make it appear to the photographic subject that the spirit of a loved one has appeared in the image with them (in exactly the way this novel's cover was made, of course!). Julius once caught Stephen and Mary in a somewhat compromising position and then exaggerated what he saw to cause problems for the two of them. Now Mary is to sit for him for another spirit photograph, and the only reason she agrees to this is to get Julius to confess his embarrassing and incriminating exaggeration about herself and Stephen to her aunt, and to give her the package Stephen left for her before he went to the front.
1918 was the year that composer Claude Debussy died, and Marie Stopes published Married Love, Manfred von Richthofen was killed in a dogfight, General Motors bought Chevrolet, 20,000 British soldiers died in one day fighting the Kaiser's army, Britain laid the keel of the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, and Italy and Japan fought on the side of the allies.
It was in January of 1918 that the Spanish flu (so called) was first noted in Kansas in the US (although it had already reared its ugly head elsewhere), and it spread rapidly, causing people to begin routinely wearing surgical masks and carrying posies and other pungent materials with them in a futile attempt to ward off what was actually an airborne virus.
It's hard now to imagine how virulent this plague was, when we're hearing almost daily of the deadly effects of the spread of Ebola in Africa, but that's a sniffle when compared with what this flu did. It struck world-wide and it killed millions upon millions, and the author does a rather scary job of conveying the fear and suspicion this disease engendered in people. I read Gina Kolata's book Flu on this pandemic, and I highly recommend it if you're interested in learning more.
Overall I was impressed by Cat Winters's writing. It was very atmospheric, realistic, and engaging. She's an author, for example, who knows that you can't (not intelligently, anyway!) say something like "So blue it was almost black." Instead, she correctly says, "...navy blue so dark it was almost black."
I've seen writers (so-called!) make the mistake with other colors. Blue, for example, is a noun which describes a color, and which describes no quality of the color other than that it's blue, so it makes no sense to say that something is so blue that it's almost black. That's the same as saying it's so blue that it's not really blue. Patent nonsense! Simply amplifying how 'blue' something is relates nothing of its lightness or darkness. This isn't a matter of opinion; it's a fact which isn't rendered any less factual simply because more than one writer makes this same mistake.
Confusing the quality of brightness with the quality of hue isn't a smart thing to do, and there are very subtle ways like this in which we, as writers, can educate readers and bring them up with us instead of talking down to them. It was really nice to see a writer who gets this. There's hope that our YA writers will get there! Many of them already have.
The story draws us ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Mary, and the fate of her friend Stephen. Someone isn't telling the truth about what happened to him, and Mary, determined to discover and uncover what happened to him, becomes quite the detective.
I liked this novel in general. It wasn't the most thrilling thing I've ever read, but it drew me in and made me care about the main character, and it was well-written, and sometimes that's enough. The ending was a little bit dissatisfying, but given how strong it was overall, I'm not going to down-grade the novel for that. Mary isn't one of my great heroes, but she is a strong character who takes charge of her life and acts positively, and we need all of those females that we can get in YA literature!
