bad shadow

About the Book This book isn't just a story about something strange outside a window. It's about what happens when a family is already broken before anything else even starts. It's about growing up in a place that doesn't feel safe, in a life that doesn't feel normal, and trying to hold everything together when most people would fall apart.At the centre of it is Marcus, a 14-year-old boy who sees more than he should have to. He understands things that most people his age wouldn't even think about, not because he wants to, but because he has to. When your life is like his, you don't get the choice to ignore things. You learn to notice everything. The story follows him as he deals with something that shouldn't exist, something that feels like it comes from somewhere darker than the world he knows. But the real story isn't just about that. It's about his family, his mum, and his two younger brothers, James and Andrew, and how each of them deals with the same situation in completely different ways.It's about protection, too. About what it means to look after the people you care about when no one else is doing it. Marcus isn't perfect, and he doesn't pretend to be. He's just a boy trying to keep his brothers safe while living in a world that hasn't been kind to any of them.There's darkness in this story. You can't really avoid that when you're writing about a family like this. But there's also something else running through it, something quieter. Something that keeps trying to push through all the bad.Hope.Not the kind that fixes everything straight away, but the kind that builds slowly, over time. The kind that stays even when everything else feels like it's falling apart.This book is about that balance. About how dark things can get, but also how people keep going anyway. Even when they don't fully understand what's happening around them.