Where Olive Climbs in the Paintings

The Shadows by Jacqueline West
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[Yes, I'm an old dude. Yes, I occasionally enjoy MG books. I also used to teach English and ESL and had lots of these books in my classroom and I still have lots of opinions about them.]

There are some fun things in this book, and I bet there are young readers who would like it. But I feel like it misses the mark.

It's a bit slow. Not deadly slow, but not awesome. The MC is likable enough, and I can get behind her, but she doesn't achieve much, and I wish she had. She mostly blunders around, seeing weird and sketchy things without knowing what to make of it, letting bad things escape. (The reader is also mostly confused. What's going on?) She does a few brave things--that's where the "pretty good" grade of 3/5 comes from--but the first 80% of the plot is so disjointed that it's frustrating.

Why don't the cats give a proper warning? Why a vague, ultimately useless one? Most of the conflict comes from her inadvertent mistakes that they could have prevented.

Her search for explanations and answers is so random and unproductive. I would rather if the author had her searching for old stories in the paper, reading private journals, winnowing it out from the paintings, or finding some other kind of evidence explaining the mystery and the dangers in the old house, something that allowed her to be more active, more intelligent. It also would have been better (IMO) if the crisis was brought on by something outside her, like maybe her parents or something happening in town, instead of it all being kinda her fault.

The final showdown, written out in words (which I'm not gonna do), is not impressive. Too easy. Very anticlimactic. It's told in a dramatic way, but it's not that great.

Maybe kids would read this with a "what happens next?" attitude, and maybe they'd like it okay, but the MC's role in the story is not very satisfying, outside a few moments here and there, and I don't know if many young readers would want to come back to this world. Maybe they would. And maybe she's a more successful hero in the next book. I hope so.

Modestly recommended. If they do like it, there are several sequels.

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