“He wanted the illusion for his daughter and his wife that nothing ugly happened here. It was the illusion that all happy childhoods were built upon. To be happy in this world, you had to ignore some things.”
Hey Adventurers!
I’m back again. I’ve really been struggling this year, so I’m sorry that the wait has been so long. I wanted to get the 2023-review-ball rolling earlier, but life sometimes gets in the way. They say, “you plan, and God laughs,” but it’s painful to think that an all-powerful God is laughing at me while I futilely try my best, so I prefer to think of it as God lovingly redirecting me. I hope your year has been going well. Anyway…
Alan Drew’s Shadow Man follows Benjamin Wade, a detective who moves his family from chaotic Los Angelos back to his quiet, perfectly planned hometown of Rancho Santa Elena after an incident on the job, hoping to save his marriage and start over. The emergence of a serial killer in this normally safe community, however, forces him and everyone around him to face harsh realities that places like Santa Elena work so hard to hide from. This book is the first up in my experiment of trying new genres that I don’t usually read, and what a way to begin!
I must start off by saying just how beautiful the writing of this book is. Every detail, from the dusty Southern California scenery, to the complex family, friend, and community relationships, to the tumultuous inner world of the characters, feels excruciatingly real. The pace is near perfect, giving you enough time to digest, but never enough to get comfortable. You feel the urgency of the case as if you yourself were Detective Wade. The characters have a unique depth while at the same time feeling perfectly ordinary, reminding you that the disturbing events that occur here in this supposedly safe community can occur, and are occurring, in safe little neighborhoods all around you. The thing that I find most beautiful about Shadow Man, however, is the story itself. It’s a hard story, but it’s a necessary story.
That being said, I find it extremely hard to recommend this book to anyone. Shadow Man is not for the faint of heart, and I feel that even the strongest person emotionally may find this story hard to stomach. To be honest, my mental health has not been amazing so far this year, and that made this read hard to get through. I found this book in a little free library in town, which I enjoy visiting, but I would have a hard time with the idea of a little reader happening upon this in said free library and reading it on their own. Hopefully they would have a loving adult with them who could help them decide which books are age appropriate.
This book is nothing like the cozy mystery novels you snuggle up with for comfort or the paint-by-numbers crime dramas that you consume effortlessly multiple times a week. You will not be taken away on a nice journey that relieves you of your real-world woes, nor will you be able to put aside the painful aspects of the crime in this novel to focus on putting the investigative puzzle pieces together. Alan Drew really forces us to see everyone’s pain, their ugly thoughts, and the parts of themselves that they hate or don’t understand, even the serial killer’s. There is a great deal of pain coming from all sides, and the only way to get to the end of this novel is to go through it all with the characters. Shadow Man also has a lot to say about the complicity of a community in its own people’s suffering, and what we are willing to ignore in order to preserve our own happiness. This book confronts and at the same time is compassionate toward its audience, which is quite rare.
Read at your own risk, but if you do read it, I think it will be worth it. I think you will be changed. And let me know if you do! – Cozie
Family Friendly Content Considerations:
Extreme Content Warning – Recommended for Adults Only
Adult Themes
Mild Use of Adult Language
Sexual Situations
Blood and Violence, including Sexual Violence
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