The Shadow Society Review

In Darcy Jones's world, she is a foster kid who's been bounced around from home to home since she was five years old. She has finally managed to stay in one home for over a year and she's so excited to be able to start the new school year with familiar friends. Until, she meets the new boy, Conn, who is inexplicably hostile toward her. Through a series of events, Darcy discovers that she isn't human or from this dimension. She is a Shade, which is a different species that exists in an alternate dimension where her home town of Chicago never had the great fire. Conn, after pretending to befriend her at school, is revealed to be an inter dimensional police officer of sorts, who was on a mission to arrest her and bring her back. The story then continues to follow their exploits in the alternate  dimension to try to bring together humans and Shades in a world where they would just assume wipe each other out.

The idea of this new paranormal creature was like a breath of fresh air when so often these types of books fall back on vampires, werewolves, ghosts, etc... The Shades are able to "ghost" or disappear and manifest whenever they like. This story had so much potential, but it fell flat for me. The basic story line, when stripped bear, is good. But the writing style was a bit disjointed to me. It jumped ahead to move the story forward rather quickly, but without any of the details about how we got there. There were several instances where I felt like I had whiplash, but no organic growth of the story. It was like, here we are now, this and this has changed, but no conversation between the characters to get the reader there.

Perhaps, if the story had been fleshed out a bit more, it could have lived up to it's potential. Again, I didn't put it down, so it kept my attention. The story got a bit slow in some spots, but I did keep reading. I only wish it had been more. More plot development, more dialogue to make the relationships seem real and not so many flash forward moments. The story was entertaining, I only wish it had been executed better. Three stars.