Summer Light and Shadows inspires the same eureka-joy of rediscovering a long misplaced, precious postcard from childhood. For all its easy reading, it waxes potent with those first moments when youth and pure innocence give way to adult realities, and a wider, richer and sometimes darker lifescape. Dennis Baylor is eleven. He lives in the pollen-hazed farmlands of Peppercorn, Virginia in the 1930s. The window of Dennis's sensitive mind shows us the transformations of his inner and outer worlds over the course of one planting season, this summer of summers, in all the vivid sensations of youth. Author Gordon Gray plants us firmly and authentically in Dennis's bare feet as he scrambles around the family farm to tend to his chores, go fishing, and frolic in long vernal hours of aimless, exultant play. But young Dennis is forced to confront a series of profound, perplexing challenges that sprawl incongruously and unbidden against this idyllic backdrop. Dennis is white, and when his family shows particular charity for a black single mother and her daughter, social forces in the community inevitably conspire to test his maturing moral fiber and deep affections for and commitment to his friends. Dennis's wan, sensitive sister Anna has not uttered a word since before Dennis was born. Raised in a household where Anna's silence has been treated as "normal," the sound of her pure, clear singing one balmy night determines Dennis for the first time to uncover why it is that Anna does not speak. The heat of this summer also begins to melt Dennis's once insulated ignorance about the Depression Era woes besetting the grownups in his family and about the town of Peppercorn. And, finally, he is impelled (though gently) to regard for the first time the nature of death and its place in our shared cosmos. In its superficially mild, yet subtly brooding scenes of childhood, Summer Light and Shadows invites us to pause and take stock in what we think we value, and appraise all that we ought to value. Ingeniously and unceremoniously wrapped in the rough tan paper and bow-tied twine of the dry goods store on Main Street, Summer Light and Shadows is a tale that will not be set aside until its reading is finished, and that haunts long after its last page is turned.
