Shadow Runner (Shadow Series)by K.J. Fieler; What Victorians Do in The Shadows
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: K.J. Fieler’s Shadow Runner novel uses shadows as a frequent motif. Characters appear and disappear into shadows. Mentors hide their true selves from students. People discover hidden secrets about Victorian London's elite. Everything and everybody is concealed by some veil of secrecy, hiding who they are, and showing their dark sides, their shadow selves.
Ada is from a wealthy upper class Victorian home who was once spoiled and coddled and now no longer is either one. Her mother died in childbirth along with her newborn baby brother. Her father, once loving and wise, has now withdrawn into himself and avoids her entirely. Besides grief, Ada is tormented by strange clouds and creatures that come in and out of the shadows at night. She is afraid especially after one of those creatures kidnaps her. It is revealed to be Nadine, a human woman, who exposes some ugly truths about the girl's father. She is part of an organization called The Shadow, a team of thieves, spies, and assassins who are capable of fighting, killing, and turning practically invisible. Finding that she no longer has a home to return to, Ada takes Nadine up on her offer to join the organization and begins a rigorous training where she learns to outfight, outwit, and outlast any opponent and to treat everyone like an enemy including those closest to her.
This book presents a fascinating look at a young girl who has to be stripped down to her barest minimum before she recognizes the hidden strength and adaptability that she needs to survive in the world. Ada starts out as an object of beauty living an ornate existence of opulence and artifice, almost a doll-child made of porcelain in a doll house. If she has questions about marriage, position, social class, her role as a woman in society, and other important issues they are all dismissed, repressed, and just flitted away.
Ada’s life is summarized as pretty to look at but don’t touch or express any feeling or deep emotional connection.That will cause the entire house to crack, flaw, and break under its fragility. Her family life stands, as did many wealthy homes in the Victorian Age, a monument to propriety, beauty, ennui, and comfortable ignorance. People who will never want for anything because they have everything.
Ada’s only sense of authenticity is when she plays chess with her father and shows profound intellect and analysis in playing the game. Besides showing her intelligence, her chess games prove useful in her Shadow career. However, at this point, it’s still confined to a game with rules in which one side wins, another loses, and there is no collateral damage. It's also one of the few moments of real bonding between Ada and her father. It is a time to out play and outsmart each other. However, Ada never realizes that she has already lost and her father had a checkmate in a game in which she didn’t even play.
The artificial existence that Ada lives in changes after the deaths of her mother and brother and her kidnapping by Nadine. For the first time, she is swept up in grief, loss, and the reality that comes with them.These emotions overwhelm her because she is so inexperienced with them. She is in torment as her once idyllic seemingly perfect world’s cracks have become more visible. She is a stranger to her father and while she still is close to some of the servants, they are dismissed by him. Ada thought that she had another family. For the servants though, it was just a job, a job that they can walk away from anytime, either by choice or by force.
Ada realizes that she is invisible in this house, a fact made clear during a bizarre multi page sequence where she actually turns invisible in the presence of the servants. She shows no reaction during it or after things return to normal and she is noticed once again. She has been pampered and petted as a pet or an ornament but is never acknowledged or seen for her true self in any way that mattered. She has been invisible and replaceable her whole life. She just didn’t realize it until now.
It is no coincidence that Ada joins The Shadows after she finds out some disturbing motives from her father. She is faced with the truth that the opulent surface that she lived in was a complete fabrication, one in which she was exalted only to be knocked down and replaced like a shiny bauble that has lost its value. Once she is shut out from that life, and she feels the despair, anger, and hatred that simmers inside, she is ready for her new life as a Shadow.
Ada’s training as a Shadow is both disturbing and mesmerizing.The Reader wants to simultaneously look away but at the same is drawn to reading what happens to her and how this experience changes her. The training is like the worst kind of bootcamp imagined and to think this is happening to children younger than thirteen, some as young as seven. The trainees are shorn of their hair, deprived of their clothes and made to wear uniforms. Some are given new names and identities. They are trained rigorously in various fighting and defense techniques and frequently challenge one another in fights to the death. They are given limited rations and are often beaten, assaulted, and verbally abused. They are brought to their lowest and most aggressive instincts and are pushed into using them for a means of survival.
The physical training of the Shadow is triggering enough, but the psychological training is also captivating and troubling. Ada and the other Trainees are not only stripped of their identities but any sense of family, friendship, or belonging. They are drilled not to trust anyone, especially not one another or their handlers. They are told things about their families that may or may not be true but certainly puts them in an air of suspicion towards those who they left behind. The trainers intentionally encourage competition and infighting among the recruits so friendship does not form within the Shadows and they see one another as enemies. This even carries over as Shadows ascend within the organization and gain recruits of their own. They then have to use those same techniques on any new trainees continuing the cycle.
The Shadow’s strongest ally in their battle against the world is the environment that surrounds them. While on assignments, they are either told to wear uniforms or period appropriate clothing to blend in and disappear within a household, sometimes impersonating servants or houseguests. At night, they also wear ghoulish disguises and masks so when they attack, they remain unidentified and can appear to be unreal like an ominous spectre or a figment from a nightmare. Then they disappear just as suddenly as they appear with no one the wiser about where they came from, where they disappeared to, their real names, or in some cases if they ever existed at all.
It is fitting that they call themselves The Shadows, because that is their most prominent weapon. They use shadows to sneak in and out of streets, alleyways, houses, and nature. They conceal themselves as they extract information and kill those whom they are assigned to. They do this to avoid emotional and mental connections with their targets and because they are not within that outside world any longer. They no longer trust it. Instead they are hidden, secret, observing a world in which they are no longer a part of except to take something from it at the behest of someone else.
Ironically as Ada remains hidden like her colleagues, her true, most honest, most authentic self emerges. Before she was living a shallow existence in a luxuriant shell. She was never honest with herself, always playing the perfect and dutiful daughter as her parents were playing the loving and proper caregivers. As a shadow, she is able to use tremendous strength and agility in fighting opponents. Her chess training allows her to strategize so she can solve problems and find solutions that result in victory. Her literacy and education helps her to visualize possibilities and research pertinent information that prove useful on assignments. As a Shadow, she is able to use skills and knowledge that would not have been possible in her previous life.
Despite all warnings. Ada’s biggest drawback is that she develops a conscience and begins to genuinely care about certain people. As her body and mind develops as a Shadow, so ironically does her heart. She becomes attached to a younger Shadow and while they engage in vicious battles and backstabbing, she withdraws from actually killing her even though she has plenty of opportunities to do so. On an assignment where she poses as a governess for an employer whom she has to steal some documents from, she bonds with the young girl that she teaches, perhaps seeing her younger self or a more assertive version in this child. She stands on the edge of a romance with the girl’s brother until Ada does something unforgivable in the name of her assignment, something that closes her connection to the outside world forever.
The strongest bond that Ada develops oddly enough is with Nadine. Despite subjecting her through physical and psychological stress that tests her endurance and ability, Ada feels a strange emotional bond with her. Call it Stockholm Syndrome. Call it codependency. Call it BDSM. But something develops between the two women that becomes mentor-student, mother-daughter, sister-sister, friend-friend (maybe lover-lover?). It is one in which the two hide much from each other but ultimately reveal the true depths of their love and loyalty. A love and loyalty that far superseded and exceeded the love that Ada and her parents, especially her father, shared.
In being rejected from the bright and beautiful but dishonest world in which she lived, Ada had to find herself in a world of honesty and authenticity, a world of tough choices and real emotions, a world of courage, stamina, thought, and sacrifice, a world of darkness and of shadows.
