Oh look, another Cybils book that I wanted to love but couldn’t. Shadows turned out to be perfectly fine but not great. I don’t generally mind made up words or ordinary words turned into slang words but in this case — it was a struggle from beginning to end. Too much of it, not enough context and to make matters worse, there were Japanese words thrown in for fun. The struggle was real. Very real.
We also spent a whole lot of the beginning of the book listening to Maggie rant about her step-father and that took way too much time and used far too many made up/slang/Japanese words.
Once the story got beyond the hatred of Val the step-father, it was better. The author does a fabulous job with animals (the kind we know and the gruaa kind that we didn’t) and the use of origami throughout the book was fantastic. These last two things make the book worth reading. Mostly.