08/26/2007

Mysteries lurk in 'Shadows'

Whelan brings intrigue to young adult readers

By ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLI

Special to the Record-Eagle

Here comes our summer treat from Michigan writer Gloria Whelan.

"Parade of Shadows” (HarperCollins) is a young adult novel of intrigue, budding love and loss, desert trekking and exotic foreign settings.

Set in 1907, it introduces us to 16-year-old Julia Hamilton, who longs for adventure. She desperately prays to leave her dreary home in England, where she is often left alone, and go off on an exciting holiday with her father, who even when home pays her little attention.

Her father is with the foreign service and spends much of the year traveling for his country. Her mother is dead. Julia's life is small and circumscribed, lived in a cheerless house.

"A chilly fog from the nearby Thames River nuzzled the windows. As usual, I was feeling lost among the austere Gothic chairs and forbidding Victorian portraits that ringed the room like spies to catch me out. Our house on Durham Place had always been too large for just Father and me. The closed-off rooms gave the feeling that half the household must be away.”

Her father suffered unhappy memories in that house. Julia knew the unhappy memories were "of my mother's illness and death ... I often felt that my father didn't see me at all.”

Then she joyfully discovers he is going to take her on a trek through Istanbul, Damascus, Palmyra and Alexandretta. They would travel by train and ship and camel and carriage. It wasn't to be an easy trip, but the promise of mystery and excitement more than made up for any discomfort she might encounter along the way. And she would be with her father, able to make him notice her again and do more than find fault with who she was and with her ideas.

Their traveling companions on the trip turn out to be people with dark secrets. One, Graham Geddes, is a young man who takes an early interest in Julia, as she takes an interest in him. Almost with their first meeting in Athens, she realizes that he is not who he claims to be.

"I'm going to see something of Syria for research I'm doing at Oxford,” he claims, adding he's been frittering away time in Athens. Almost immediately, a Turkish soldier appears and asks to see his passport, which shows that he hasn't been in Athens long at all, but was in Salonika in northern Greece.

Graham is to be Julia's first true romance, but with consequences she isn't willing to pay. When the choice of saving her new love at the expense of her father becomes a reality, Julia is forced to not only grow up quickly, but discover the things that truly make up love and loyalty.

Others on the trip, including her father, who is traveling under an assumed identity, turn out to be equally as mysterious as Mr. Geddes. There is a collector of antiquities with dubious ties to the Turkish and French governments. There is a collector of plants — Edith Phillips of England's Kew Gardens — who mysteriously leaves the party out on the desert only to require a ransom be paid to get her back.

Everyone in the book, with the exception of Julia, has more than one secret. They are secrets that slowly come to light and include an attempted murder. There is trouble everywhere in the Ottoman Empire, with England and France attempting to use those troubles to their own ends — empire building.

The sultan and the Turkish military stop everyone. Everyone is under suspicion. Members of their party land in prison. They are let go mysteriously. Nothing is at is seems.

Julia has had her fill of excitement and intrigue. At Antioch, exhausted from not just her travels, but also the stress and worry, Julia sits on the hotel veranda. She looks at the hills around the town and thinks, "A month before, I would have given years of my life to experience the view before me at that moment — the ancient town, the parade of exotically dressed people looking like an opera director's fantasy, the mingled smells of jasmine and spices and other things not quite so pleasant.”

"Parade of Shadows” embroils the reader in a very different world. That world comes to life on the page, along with history, flora and fauna, antiquities, spying and a young girl's first love.

Most of all, this is an engrossing read.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli can be reached at ebuzzelli@aol.com