Just as Ray Bradbury, in his masterpiece “Dandelion Wine,” forever put the prewar American Midwest on the map of world literature, so Jeffrey Ford in “The Shadow Year” masterfully recreates the taste, color, and feeling of childhood. Here, on Long Island on the eve of the “flower revolution,” Mister Tighworth delivers ice cream, schoolchildren are assigned to make a plaster Moon, the Rag City in the basement predicts a new appearance of the ghost that has already frightened local housewives half to death—and leaves behind a trail of corpses the sinister Mr. White, a lover of pipe tobacco and a maniacal apostle of cleanliness…