Shades of Darkness

Gr 10 Up—A contemporary American gothic with evocative details but an unsatisfying payoff. While attending the Islington Arts Academy, a private boarding school in northern Michigan, Kaira begins to have flashbacks to a violent episode from her past. She tries to suppress the frightening visions while focusing on her friendships and completing her senior thesis, a series of paintings based on Tarot cards. But when her classmates start dying mysteriously, the protagonist becomes convinced she is somehow responsible. The particulars of winter at boarding school leap off the page; well-drawn descriptions of frozen lakes, silent woods, neo-rustic architecture, and the pleasures of hot tea and waffles bring the setting to life. The narrator and her friends are an appealing bunch of quirky visual, musical, and performing artists with a heavy dose of adolescent hormones and what-happens-next senior angst. Their teenage banter and trash-talking is quite funny and helps define their relationships, although the narrator's reference to a gay friend as "homo" may give readers pause. The book's central mystery, what happened to Kaira and how it's related to the deaths, unfolds at a frustratingly slow pace and is only partially resolved in the final pages. The ending sets up a second volume in the series.