The Shadow Mother by Seán Virgo (review)

A man who came of age sailing on ships falls in love with the girl he meets in the sea; when she sheds her shadow on the beach at night, he claims it—and thus her—for his own. He brings her back to his seaside home, and there they have a son, who grows up “in a silent house,” with both his mother and father happier outside. In the attic one day the boy discovers his father’s sea chest, and in it, a skin, black on one side and white on the other. The skin’s rough edges prick the boy’s fingers and give him a suffocating fever, but a voice in the night tells him that going into the ocean’s waves will cure him. A reimagining of Celtic selkie lore, this book contains a long arc, gossamer prose, and conceptual artwork that require sophistication well beyond what’s considered standard picture book age, but readers willing to engage will find a text lush with tactile imagery and the quandaries of loneliness in the midst of obsession and love. Serrano Pérez’s pencil illustrations combine the elongation and chiaroscuro of El Greco with the soft roundness of Paul Zelinsky’s pencilwork and the surrealism of Dalí in panels that place human faces as part of the landscape as fish fly into homes through windows. The panels are tinged with the faintest of colors, giving them a vintage aesthetic reminiscent of woodcuts and enhancing the who-knows-when-and-where setting necessary for the sharp folkloric edge of this book; these are interspersed with cloudy yet more concrete spot art with slightly more color. There are more questions than answers in this slim volume, but readers willing to sit with a haunting tale that will break if handled too roughly will be rewarded with an artfully paired word-and-image reverie.