Shadow Baby

by Alison McGhee

Book Overview

A young girl forms an unforgettable friendship with an elderly neighbor while searching for answers about her family's past in this national bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Eleven-year-old... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312423772
• ISBN13: 9780312423773
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The book that got my bookclub back together

For anyone who runs a book club, I highly recommend this short and sweet book. It's easy for all club members to finish in a month, and it will inspire a wealth of emotions and reactions in the reader. Clara is a bit precocious for an 11-year old, but her world view is very realistic. We see her mother Tamar only through Clara's eyes, and Clara has trouble relating to her mother. Clara relates beautifully to an old man who lives near her, and their friendship illustrates the wealth of both life lessons and practical knowledge that can be gleaned from our elders. Enjoy this book as Clara makes friends, learns about life, unravels the mysteries of her past, and comes to understand her mother.

Pack this one in your beach bag...

I just loved this book! You can't help but love Clara, Georg, and even Tamar. The story worked at a great pace with small surprises thrown in when you least expected. One of the ways I know that a book is really great is that it plays out almost like a movie in my head, and that is the vivid manner in which Alison McGhee wrote each scene and dialogue between her characters. There was an equal mixture of funny, thoughtful, heartwarming, (and tear-jerking-is that a word? ) moments to keep a reader both entertained and enlightened. I agree with another one of the reviewers that I would love to learn the next installment of Clara's life! (sequel, sequel! )

Strange and wonderful

In contrast to what a reviewer above said, I'm always really GLAD when someone else starts their review with a synopsis of the plot. Everybody's perception of what happened in a novel is a little bit different -- some people see one thing as the novel's focus and others something else. It can tell you a lot about a novel to read several different descriptions of the story (unless they're all swiping their descriptions from the book jacket!). So, here's the book that *I* read when I read "Shadow Baby":Novel about 11-year-old Clara Winter (who prefers having her last name pronounced without the capital letter -- "winter" -- which tells you quite a bit about her precocious character). When she is given a school assignment to interview an elderly person, she latches onto an old immigrant man living in a trailer, Georg. Clara's whole world is constructed of stories, so many of which she has invented herself that she can hardly remember what is true and what isn't. Through her friendship with Georg, Clara learns how to see the world in a new way -- to see everything without focusing on any one thing. And through that, she gradually begins to learn how to let go of her obsession with the past. This was a very touching novel about both a girl coming-of-age and the wisdom one can find in the strangest places -- in an illiterate old metalworker and in a mixed-up 11-year-old girl. Recommended!

Stunning!

What a wonderful, wonderful book! Clara winter (you'll see why she spells her last name without a capital when you read the book) is an 11-year-old girl you'll never forget. She is precocious in her wordminded-ness, yet naive and childlike in her propensity for fantasy. In Shadow Baby, Clara goes on a search for her own history--her dead twin sister, her MIA grandfather, her phantom father. This book is stunningly written, both hilariously funny and achingly sad. Truly a literary feat. Love it love it love it.