“¡No! ¡No puede! You must finish it, Sierra. Finish it now! As soon as possible!...They are coming for us. Coming for the shadowshapers.”
The story opens with fifteen-year-old Sierra painting a mural on a much-despised uncompleted building in her neighborhood known locally as The Tower. Seeming to rise almost overnight in the last year, the Tower is a “concrete monstrosity” built in haste and abandoned just as quickly before completion. Lázaro is Sierra’s grandfather who has barely spoken since he suffered a stroke. Everything seems different about him on this day, however, as he struggles to move and speak with urgency. He is as passionate and as physical as he can muster the strength as he encourages Sierra with a strange sense of urgency to complete her work mural as quickly as possible. As only the artists seem to know about such things, Sierra insists that at the rate things are going, it will not be until the end of summer before it is finished. Her grandfather refuses this answer. And thus, this becomes the moment that Sierra learns of a term she has never heard before, but which will soon dominate her life: shadowshaper.
"She chose a skirt and a tube top with a loose white blouse over it. But it was hard work making suggestions and not blatant declarations with her ever-changing Puerto Rican body. Some days her butt was too big; on others she couldn’t even find it. Was it the way her pants hung? What she ate last night? Her mood? Her period?"
A thematic obsession running beneath the plot is the impact of body image on young women, especially in a culture where ideals of beauty may conflict with the perspectives of dominant white society. Sierra may have shadowshapers to learn about and what her grandfather meant with his warning that “they” are coming for them. Still, she is also a typical teenage girl trying to navigate the complex world of adolescence. Part of those treacherous waters includes obsessive concern over self-image. This natural—or, at least, naturally expected—aspect of teenage femininity is further complicated in Sierra’s case by another thematic undertone guiding the plot: growing up Puerto Rican.
"Sierra had never seen so many books. Economic Development in the Third World, one title proclaimed loudly from a display table. Studies in Puerto Rican Literature said another. It’d never even occurred to her there was such a thing as Puerto Rican literature, let alone that it would be worthy of a thick volume in a Columbia University library."
That Sierra’s cultural heritage is Puerto Rican is essential to the story. That heritage impacts her body image issues, introduces Spanish into conversational dialogue, and even contributes to the setting despite the story not taking place in Puerto Rico. The impact of gentrification in Brooklyn on neighborhoods with large a population comprised of the Puerto Rican underclass is integrally connected to the events stimulating the plot. The irony of the gap existing between how much her Puerto Rican descent impacts her life and how little Sierra actually knows that heritage is overtly displayed in the moment of recognition of her own ignorance of the existence of a body of literature devoted just to issues related to being Puerto Rican. And yet even in the midst of this eye-opening epiphany, Sierra is quick to allow the full significance of discovery to pass due to other issues of more immediately pressing importance. However, the recognition is imprinted in her memory, and she will return to revisit its significance.
