Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Oliver and the Missing Shade

Oliver and the Missing Shade

Miller, Renee

Paperback

General Juvenile Fiction

ISBN13: 9798182907835
Publisher: Renee Miller
Published: Oct 13 2026
Pages: 138
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Twelve-year-old Oliver Foster has become an expert at making everyone else believe he is happy. Since his father, Julian, left their coastal home a year ago, Oliver has kept his grieving mother, Helena, afloat with endless jokes, bright greetings, and a smile he forces into place each morning. He has convinced himself that if he never cries, she will never fall apart. But one morning, beneath the unforgiving sunlight, Oliver discovers that he has lost something impossible to explain: his shadow.In its place, a trail of strange silver-blue dust winds away from the family cottage and climbs the cliffs toward Penumbra Reach, an uncanny lighthouse that seems built to soften the cruelty of daylight. Following it, Oliver meets Franklin Moore, the tower's quiet keeper, and discovers a sanctuary filled with wandering shadows-fragile silhouettes separated from the people whose hidden feelings they carry. Franklin understands that a shadow is more than an outline: it holds the grief, fear, and truth its owner has tried to bury.Oliver wants only to retrieve his missing shade and return to the life he knows. Yet the deeper he ventures into the lighthouse, the harder it becomes to hide behind his cheerful performance. The shadow he seeks is bound to the sorrow he has refused to acknowledge, especially the pain of his father's departure and the burden of protecting his mother from her own grief. As the tower's strange light and restless silhouettes draw him toward a reckoning, Oliver must decide whether he will keep pretending to be unbreakable or finally let himself feel what he has spent a year suppressing.Oliver and the Missing Shade is an atmospheric fantasy about loss, emotional honesty, and the courage it takes to stop carrying pain alone. Against a haunting coastal landscape of sea fog, glowing dust, and a mysterious lighthouse, Oliver learns that sadness does not destroy the people who love one another. Sometimes, telling the truth is what allows them to find their way back into the light.At school, observant Daisy Cooper is the first to look past Oliver's grin and ask where he has left himself. Her question follows him up the cliffs, forcing him to recognize what his performance has concealed even from himself. In the lighthouse, the shadows' silent gestures make visible the loneliness and sorrow that ordinary words have failed to hold. As dawn approaches, he must choose honesty over the mask that has kept him lonely. He must grieve.

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General Juvenile Fiction

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