“The first book in a popular series about a girl who discovers that the paintings in her new home hold many secrets. An engaging blend of magic, mystery, and fantasy, for early middle graders.” – Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor

For fans of Pseudonymous Bosch, Coraline, and Septimus Heap comes the first book in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Books of Elsewhere series.

This house is keeping secrets . . .

When eleven-year-old Olive and her parents move into the crumbling mansion on Linden Street and find it filled with mysterious paintings, Olive knows the place is creepy—but it isn’t until she encounters its three talking cats that she realizes there’s something darkly magical afoot. Then Olive finds a pair of antique spectacles in a dusty drawer and discovers the most peculiar thing yet: She can travel inside the house’s spooky paintings to a world that’s strangely quiet . . . and eerily sinister. But in entering Elsewhere, Olive has been ensnared in a mystery darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. With only the cats and an unusual boy she meets in Elsewhere on her side, it’s up to Olive to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2010:  Hair-raising adventures can be found close to home this summer. Soon after 11-year-old Olive Dunwoody moves into a rundown Victorian mansion with her nerdy mathematician parents, she realizes something isn’t quite right. It’s full of oddities like strange paintings hanging on the walls and a trio of talking cats lurking in the shadows. While Olive’s parents busy themselves solving math problems, she decides to work out the mysteries of the dusty old pictures by plunging headlong into the world on the other side of the frames. But, will she be able to escape the hidden dangers of Elsewhere? From the first few pages of The Shadows: The Books of Elsewhere, middle grade readers will be hooked on this spooky new series. –Lauren Nemroff