Her mother vanished ten years ago in the world next door. The shadow will lead her there.
Joanne Trouton is thirteen. She welds strange metal creatures in her dad’s shed, has red hair, freckles, and a mother who disappeared ten years ago on the other side of somewhere Dad won’t talk about.
Then a shadow without a body peels itself off the garden fence and slips under the shed door, and everything Jo has quietly wondered about for a decade turns out to be stranger than she imagined.
The other side is a place called Very, where books teach themselves to fly, tortoises join the police force, and a Duchess called Purity is quietly collecting people’s shadows and controlling what’s left. Somewhere in Very, in a room locked for ten years, Jo’s mother is trapped in ten seconds of her own life, waiting for someone to find her.
Jo is going to cross over and get her back. Along the way, she’ll help the runaway shadow remember the shape of his soul, a grounded sylph-boy find new wings, and a talking cat-Duke understand why his country went on vacation. She’ll flee a flock of flapping books, co-pilot a race-winning bunkbed, and discover that the small, strange knack she’s always had with metal has a name—ferromancy—and that the Duchess has very good reasons to be afraid of her.
The Shadow in the Shed and the World Next Door is a funny, sad, occasionally frightening middle-grade fantasy about grief, art, and the difference between the parts of ourselves we hide and the parts someone else has cut away.
First in a new series for readers of Terry Pratchett, Cressida Cowell, and Frances Hardinge.
