Tag Archives: fiction

The Little Shadows will be published on September 27, 2011 but is already receiving a ton of buzz (including the Giller longlist Reader’s Choice). And I have to say that the praise is well-warranted. Gentle prose, quiet plot, and enticing characters are all present in Endicott’s latest novel about three sisters beginning a career in vaudeville. The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is sixteen when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous headstrong sprite Bella, who is thirteen. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott’s genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters – some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts. From the publisher, Doubleday Canada (an imprint of Random House). I was lucky to receive an ARC from the publisher and read The Little Shadows a few months ago. I was looking forward to it because I really enjoyed Marina Endicott’s novel, Good to a Fault—which was part of [...]