Secure the Shadow: A Novel

by Michael Henson

An interconnected web of lives in one midwestern city captures the surprising humanity of people searching for their authentic selves amid the 1990s drug crisis. Amy Taylor finds the inner-city streets around her high school vibrant and animated compared to the bland middle-class neighborhood where she lives with her career-driven mother. In these streets, she meets the people of the city, among them a wayward boy named Jonathan, a struggling drug dealer, and Paul Lewis, a documentary photographer who becomes Amy’s mentor. Under his inspiration, she attempts to capture their world through the lens of her camera. From the multiple perspectives of Amy and the expansive group of people she meets, award-winning novelist Michael Henson presents a heartbreaking portrait of the effects the Reagan-initiated drug war had on the young.

262 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2021

About the author

Michael Henson is an American poet and novelist. He is a founding member of the Urban Appalachian Council.

Reviews

[Jason Pettus · Rating 2 out of 5]

2021 reads, #100. Although I didn't find anything particularly wrong with this character-heavy morality tale by Michael Henson, I also found little to be excited by or engaged with, a sort of by-the-numbers social-realist drama that feels very much at all times like the fussy output of an MFA poetry veteran through an academic press that it actually is. It's a book I finished mostly just to say that I did, not because I was particularly invested in seeing how it ends, which by definition typically gets it a thoroughly middle-of-the-road score of 2.5 stars, rounded down to 2 here at the no-half-star Goodreads, since it was more on the "bleh" side of "meh" and not the "eh!" side.

[Ken Rothe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book uses the structural artifice of analyzing a number of photographs which carries the story
very well. The protagonist, a high school girl studying art and photography, moves through the different worlds of a professional photographer, a middle class ex-model mother and the drug infested streets which she traverses daily. The book chronicles her increasing understanding of these worlds and the adults, and youth, who populate them. The language used, particularly the choice of descriptive adjectives and adverbs, is vivid, not infrequently providing a jolt of acknowledgement that things are not always as they may seem on the surface of the lives being revealed in the flow of the book.
I highly recommend Secure the Shadow by Mike Henson as an enjoyable and meaningful read.