Stepping From the Shadows

The semi-autobiographical coming of age story of Frances Stuart, a sensitive, imaginative child and "army brat" whose life is disrupted by her family's moves from Arizona to Germany and England. As a second grader in a nun-taught parochial school she is instill with dread of sin and retribution, and as she grows she continues to be tormented by self-judgment and discomfort in regard to her sexuality. The former she unloads in writing on an invented "shadow sister," while the latter she symbolizes as a "Stagman" who appears to her when she experiences unwelcome erotic feelings. These fixations continue to trouble her as a college student in Los Angeles and as she strikes out on her own, finding her own voice as a writer in the Pacific Northwest and ultimately a writers' colony in New England.

Barbara A. Bannon in Publishers Weekly, noting McKillip's status as "[a]n author of outstanding books for younger readers," calls this, "her first novel for adults, a real spellbinder." She observes the story's "sensitive, balladlike prose" and calls the section on the protagonist as a college woman in California "the story's high point."^[2]

Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times finds the book "rich, particular and extremely appealing," characterizing it as "a beautifully written, honest, frequently funny and self-unsparing chronicle ... of the growing up of a young woman who cannot be different, in any significant spiritual way, from McKillip herself. In its unassertive intimacy and fragility--and despite its rare literary grace--"Stepping From the Shadows" seems a small publishing miracle, whose appearance on the spring list means that an editor loved it, not that anyone thought it would make a dime."^[3]

Joyce Smothers in Library Journal calls the book "a departure from the author's seven award-winning fantasy novels for young adults," an "obscure, challenging novel of psychological realism," "[r]ich in poetic description ... long on introspection and short on plot." She notes that a "variety of exotic settings add to the novel," and recommends it "for large fiction collections, and for the perceptive reader."^[4]

The Hartford Courant praised the novel for "vivid imaginings" and "lyrical prose."^[5]

The book was also reviewed by Phyllis J. Day in Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review no. 10, December 1982, Charles de Lint in Dragonfields: Tales of Fantasy no. 4, Winter 1983, and Robert Coulson in Amazing Stories v. 59, no. w, September 1985.^[1]