Second year principal Tim Reardon’s book Shadow Lessons was a huge hit over the summer with the students and teachers.

    Reardon’s book was on the upper division fiction reading choices for the students Summer Reading, and it received the most votes on the The Crusader newspaper website poll.

    Reardon said, “My inspiration for writing a book was that I tried to put my skills in English and writing and use it in a different, creative way.”

    Knowing Reardon, the similarities between the main character, Sean Cullinan, and himself are quite noticeable.

    Sean Cullinan is a high school English teacher, as well as the basketball coach. When Reardon wrote the book, he was at St. Ignatius as a English teacher and the head varsity  basketball coach.

    Reardon said, “Half of the characters in the book are from people I know in real life. Some characters are even a combination of a couple different people that I know.”

    The main topic of the book, in my opinion, was very unexpected. The characters and some of the storyline seemed pretty normal, but the topic was a bit surprising.

    The main topic was primarily about racial ethics and public reaction to a hypothetical situation involving race.

    Reardon said, “The news media does a lot of coverage on issues involving race and so it seems that people are interested about race.”

    The topic of race is a complex issue to try to create a fictional storyline for, especially for it being his first published book.

    Despite that, Reardon did a good job creating an enticing storyline with credible dialogue to culminate in a solid, interesting book.

    Reardon has another book published, Parts of the Game, available on Amazon.