The Shadows: The Books of Elsewhere #1 by Jacqueline West, illustrated by Poly Bernatene (Dial/Penguin, $16.99, 9780803734401/0803734409, 256 pp., ages 9-11, June)
It's summer, and Olive Dunwoody, age 11¾, has just moved into a new house on Linden Street with her mathematician parents. Well, it's new to the Dunwoodys, but the house is very, very old. Olive thinks it's "crumbly and dark and weird," but the old stone house is certainly more interesting than the apartments they've called home in the past. For instance, when Olive tells her mother about a painting that she finds "creepy" ("It's like the houses are trying to pretend they're asleep, and stay quiet... like something bad is coming"), her mother tries to take it down, but the painting won't budge. That's Olive's first clue that something strange is going on here. Next, an orange cat enters her bedroom and introduces himself as Horatio. He warns Olive, "There is something that doesn't want you here, and it will do its best to get rid of you." Olive's absent-minded-professor–type parents spend all their time in the home's library, leaving Olive plenty of freedom to explore the seemingly endless hallways and five guest rooms upstairs. In the chest of drawers in the violet guest room, Olive finds a pair of spectacles. No ordinary eyeglasses, these allow Olive to peer inside the paintings and, as she gets closer and closer to them, she discovers she can actually press her nose through what should be the canvas, which seems to "turn to jelly as her face [sinks] through it." Olive can enter the paintings.
Poet West, making her fiction debut, exploits the possibilities of an alternate world that only Olive, the cats (Horatio introduces her to two other talking felines), and the characters inside the paintings know about. As Olive sets out to solve the mystery of who or what wants to get rid of her, she must also decide whom she can trust. The people inside the paintings warn her that the cats are her enemies, but they've come to Olive's rescue more than once. Then there's Milton, the boy she first notices in one of the paintings flitting among the trees in a white nightshirt, who talks about a mysterious "bad man" who trapped him in the painting. West awakens the senses with scents of moth balls and "very old potpourri" in the guest rooms, and the icy temperatures and animated thorny branches in the dark painting where evil forces pursue Olive and Morton. Olive makes mention of her favorite books, including C.S. Lewis, as she searches for an entrance to the house's attic ("She checked the rooms... even looking in drawers and wardrobes, like anyone who has read about Narnia would"). But she's also an intrepid adventurer, the more charming for her determination to overcome her fears. West brings this launch title to a roundly satisfying close but leaves room for plenty more excursions to Elsewhere.--Jennifer M. Brown