Release Date: August 1st 2010
Pages: 264
Audiobook Hours: 6 hours 9 minutes
Genre: Contemporary
Publisher: Pan Macmillian Australia
It’s the end of Year 12. Lucy’s looking for Shadow, the graffiti artist everyone talks about.
His work is all over the city, but he is nowhere.
Ed, the last guy she wants to see at the moment, says he knows where to find him. He takes Lucy on an all-night search to places where Shadow’s thoughts about heartbreak and escape echo around the city walls.
But the one thing Lucy can’t see is the one thing that’s right before her eyes
It’s the end of Year 12 and Lucy Dervish’s friends want to make the most of the
night. With boys. But all Lucy wants to do is get away from her former classmate, Ed and find Shadow, the anonymous street artist she just has a feeling she’ll have a connection with. So when Ed’s friends tell her Ed can help her find Shadow, they spend the night together wandering through the streets and through Shadow’s work.
But, what Lucy doesn’t know is Ed and Shadow are the same person. I really enjoyed this audiobook, I went into it knowing nothing about the story and was really thrown into the world Crowley created. The novel is broken up with 3 narrators, Lucy, Ed aka Shadow and Ed’s friend Leo aka Poet. Because the characters are all artists their narration is
colored in visuals and pictures. Despite the characters spending much of the night together, it is interesting how they each interpret the night differently.
This was a full cast audiobook, and the voices fit extremely well with the characters. The voice actors didn’t try too hard to create different voices and I thought that really worked.
Crowley does a beautiful job with the pacing and style of this novel. All of the plot takes places over about 10 hours of the characters just walking around town, so there is a lot of retrospective storytelling. I’m not usually a fan of books with multiple voices, especially when they are in the same room, but Crowley masters it. I was afraid the whole ‘we know who Shadow is, but Lucy doesn’t’ shtick would get tired, but it adds an extra layer of tension to all of their conversations
This novel does what I think YA does best, it looks at characters who are trying to figure out what their future is supposed to be. They are battling the insecurities that go with being an capital A adult and figuring out what being an adult really means.
This is a wonderful novel and a really great audiobook. Perfect for anyone interested in art history or street art. This is also an Australian novel, so it adds some diversity for us, American readers!
Amazon | Indiebound | Barnes and Noble
I’m a lifelong reader who started blogging about YA books in 2011 but now I read in just about every genre! I love YA coming of age stories, compelling memoirs and genre bending SFF. You can find me talking all things romance at Romance and Sensibility.