Daniel José Older’s YA fantasy Shadowshaper is a rich fantasy drawing on contemporary urban mythologies commingled with older traditions with Hispanic and African roots. The protagonist, Sierra, is a mixed race young woman whose family came to New York from Puerto Rico. She’s a talented street artist who makes fantastic, monumental murals on abandoned buildings. And perhaps, she is something more.
Sierra helps her family care for her grandfather Lázaro, who is paralysed and not entirely coherent following a severe stroke, but who keeps trying to communicate a message to her, about a person called Lucera, about shadowshapers, and about the importance of a mural she’s working on. At his insistence, she recruits another street artist, a Haitian boy named Robbie, to help her complete her mural. It turns out he’s a shadowshaper himself, but is reluctant to talk about it.
What he does tell her, and what she manages to glean from remarks by some of her abuelo’s old friends - and in one case, the notes of one old friend gone missing who was an anthropologist studying urban mythology and magic systems - is that something is going wrong, some evil force is possessing the dead body of one of her abuelo’s friends, and Lucera, a spirit woman, may be the key if she can be found.
Sierra slowly learns that shadowshapers are people gifted with the ability to make alliances with spirits, to create shapes that spirits can inhabit. Most shadowshapers draw forms for the spirits they work with, but some, like her abuelo, could tell stories so vividly that the shadows, or spirits, could manifest in his words. For real shadowshapers, this is a cooperative thing, they invite the shadows to come into their work, and the shadows, in return, agree to help the shadowshaper. But there are shadowshapers who are corrupted by power, and these can force the spirits into doing their bidding, turn them into corrupted haints, used them to animate the dead. And it seems that one such corrupted shadowshaper is waging war against Sierra, her abuelo, and his friends.
As Sierra learns more about her family and her abilities, the dangers grow stronger, but her friends band around her for the final showdown between the evil that seeks to destroy her family and the other remaining shadowshapers, and take the gifts of shadowshaping for itself.
Sierra is a wonderfully realised character. Strong, talented, she is at once an ordinary teenaged girl dealing with body image and first boyfriend, and the inheritor of a powerful mystical tradition. She’s a warrior on many levels - she fights for her family’s mystical heritage, but she also fights as best she can against the day-to-day issues she faces as a yiung woman of mixed race - street harassment, casual racism, colourism among her own relatives, some of whom disapprove of her “nappy hair” and hanging out with a boy darker skinned than she is. Sierra’s worlds are both fantastic, and very real, and that’s a big part of what makes her such a pleasure to read about. Representation matters, and this is representation at its best.
Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to Shadowshaper, takes place several months after the first book. Sierra, as the new Lucera, or central focus of the spiritual powers that allow her and others like her to work with the spirits, is rebuilding the shadowshaper community with a new generation of practitioners, including her own mother, finally reconciled to their family legacy.
Sierra is waiting for trouble. Back when she was first discovering her abilities and tracking down Wicks, the corrupt power-seeker who was responsible for the deaths of so many of her grandfather’s shadowshapers friends, she crossed paths with powers called the Sorrows, who were using Wicks for their own purposes, and wanted to use her, too.
Now the Sorrows have sent her a message, through one of her schoolmates, a white girl named Mina, who tries to give her a card that looks like a Tarot card, but not one from any deck she’s every heard of. All Mina can tell her is that something known as The Deck is now “in play” and that the Sorrows are trying to connect the cards of the deck with the people each card represents. And that it means trouble for those of the Shadowhouse. While she doesn’t know much about what it means, or how to use it, she does know that whoever holds the deck will have an advantage in whatever is coming. And right now, that advantage is hers - if she can figure out how to use it before the Sorrows and their allies destroy her house and her people.
In addition to the things like plot, characters, worldbuilding, use of language, description, dialogue, and all those other things that can make or break a book, and which are all good in these two books, what is wonderful about Shadowshaper and Shadowhouse Fall is the way that Older works real life issues into his created world. This is a universe that acknowledges things like police brutality, racism, colourism ablism, sexism, and shows the little everyday things that wear away at anyone who is marginalised. Dealing with the metal detectors every day at school. Learning your friend is dealing with a mental health issue and trying not to say the stupid ableist things. Coping with your aunt’s colourism. Not trusting a white teacher to get it right when they teach about slavery. Wolfwhistles and catcalls on the street when all you want is to be left to your own business in peace. This is more than a fantasy about young people gaining their powers and coming of age. It’s also a realistic story about living in an unjust world and coping with the daily assaults and microagressions. That’s a huge part of what makes these books not just good, but special.
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