A Certain Slant of Light

Features

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Cover Type: Paperback with 288 pages
• Published by: Graphia
• Edition: 1st Edition September 21, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 061858532X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618585328
• Book Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 9.6 ounces

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up–Laura Whitcomb's compellingly complicated story (Graphix, 2005) combines dead spirits, existential angst, teens in modern families inhabiting both ends of the neglected/overprotected spectrum, unprotected teen sex, accusations of misconduct against a teacher, and requited love. Helen, who died as a young lady in the mid-19th century, has not been able to attain her final rest. Across the years, she has attached her invisible self to one living host after another, staying by each one's side so as to maintain enough life force to work through whatever happened at her death—and in her own life—that will not allow her to go peacefully. The hosts have no conscious sense of her presence—she does them no harm—and Helen moves on to a new host when her current one dies. In the 21st century, she's been attached to a high school English teacher. Helen realizes that a student in one of the classes sees her quite clearly. In fact, the contemporary student, Billy, is actually a young man named James who, like Helen, died but has gone a step beyond haunting a living host to inhabiting the living body of one. Lauren Molina's performance of this ghost story is appropriately breathy, although some of the characters—including James—sound too young because of her high voice. The denouement here is exciting and unexpected, giving listeners much to ponder and discuss: Are such hauntings plausible? How responsible are overly protective parents for poor decisions their teens make? When is circumstantial evidence really enough for anyone to draw absolutely certain conclusions?–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
Dead is the new pink. The formerly living occupy a huge amount of creative space these days -- in television ("Ghost Whisperer," "Medium"), film ("Corpse Bride," "Just Like Heaven"), novels like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, even a highly regarded show of spirit photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ghosts are traditionally scary, but many of these eldritch forms are hauntings of a kinder, gentler sort. Even the most hard-nosed unbelievers, it seems, can derive a peculiar comfort from the notion that we're rubbing elbows with the otherworld -- think of Mexico's Dia de los Muertos, when families honor deceased loved ones by picnicking on their graves.

A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb's lyrical and utterly compelling first young adult novel, features two ghostly young protagonists who become lovers -- yes, in the flesh, though it takes a bit of work for them to get there. We first encounter the novel's narrator, Helen, in a contemporary high school classroom where she is shadowing her host, an English teacher named Mr. Brown. Helen has been dead for more than 130 years. She is one of the Light (ghosts) who move among those of us who are still Quick (alive). The precise details of her death are a mystery, carefully doled out during the course of the book, and while there is an unavoidable melancholy to these accounts, there's nothing morbid or gross. The aftermath of death here, as in real life, is mostly loneliness, grief and confusion -- "I could remember my name, my age, that I was a woman, but death swallowed the rest."

Helen's first host was a poet. Helen refers to her as "my Saint," but readers will recognize Emily Dickinson (whose work gives Whitcomb's book its title). After her Saint's death, Helen's literary tastes were sated by other hosts: first a writer, then a playwright, a poet and finally a novelist manque -- Mr. Brown. Despite her great affection for them, Helen has very limited impact upon her hosts or their surroundings.

"When you are Light," Whitcomb explains, "it is only your emotions that can send a ripple into the tangible world. A flash of frustration when your host closes a novel he is reading too soon might stir his hair and cause him to check the window for a draft. A sigh of mourning at the beauty of a rose you cannot smell might startle a bee away. Or a silent laugh at a misused word might cause a student's arm to prickle with an inexplicable chill." It is in Mr. Brown's English class that Helen has the sudden frightening realization that she has been actually been seen, by a teenage boy named Billy -- only it's not Billy who sees her at all, but the animating spirit inside him, that of a young man named James.

Billy, it seems, was a junkie who suffered a near-fatal overdose; as his spirit left his body, the intrepid James stepped in and has been occupying him ever since.

In the hands of a less accomplished writer, this possession could have been merely horrific or even farcical. Instead, Whitcomb spins a moving tale of loss and redemption that is also a page-turner. James is intelligent, a good student, stable, responsible and remorseful for the mistakes he made in his earlier life. But the foul-mouthed Billy was none of these, and James has to be careful that his host's newfound sobriety and studiousness don't blow his cover. (Among other things, Billy's older brother, the hard-living but decent Mitch, thinks that Billy is showing signs of mental illness.)

Whitcomb invokes numerous literary precedents, all works that the bookish Helen loves -- Jane Eyre, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Emily Dickinson's poetry, A Christmas Carol, "Romeo and Juliet." But the pangs of romantic obsession are nothing compared to those suffered by James and his incorporeal beloved, who want to experience the real thing. James explains to Helen how she can cleave to a living host and accompanies her to a mall to find an appropriate one. Her first attempt almost destroys Helen, as she unwittingly enters the mind of a deranged woman. But her next effort is successful: She attaches herself to Jenny, a pretty, emotionally damaged 15-year-old whose disassociative state has been caused by her religiously conservative and controlling parents.

Jenny attends the same school as Billy, and Whitcomb's narrative soars at breakneck speed as the two teenagers become lovers and soulmates, defying family members in their seemingly doomed struggle to remain together. The stakes are raised even higher when Jenny's parents decide to pull their daughter from high school and send her someplace where her creative drive will be crushed, thus dooming Jenny and sentencing Helen to the spiritual equivalent of a second death.

Whitcomb juggles numerous narrative and thematic devices with amazing skill, all the more remarkable in a first-time novelist: first love and grown-up grief; the stirrings of sexual passion after an incalculable loss; blame, betrayal and forgiveness; the power of art to redeem even those who seem irrevocably damaged.

A Certain Slant of Light is marketed as a young adult novel, but its themes and its language are unapologetically grown-up. By the end of the book, Whitcomb's star-crossed lovers are confronting the moral repercussions of their passion. Can James and Helen restore Billy and Jenny to their rightful bodies, giving them each another chance at life, while retaining their own abiding love for each other? I held my breath, hoping that this wonderful new novelist could pull it off. She did, which only made me want to read this haunting book all over again to see exactly how.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
"The pain, once I was dead, was very memorable. I was deep inside the cold, smothering belly of a grave when my first haunting began. I heard her voice in the darkness reading Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale.' Icy water was burning down my throat, splintering my ribs, and my ears were filled with a sound like a demon howling, but I could hear her voice and reached for her. One desperate hand burst from the flood and caught the hem of her gown. I dragged myself, hand over hand, out of the earth and quaked at her feet, clutching her skirts, weeping muddy tears. All I knew was that I had been tortured in the blackness, and then I had escaped. Perhaps I hadn't reached the brightness of heaven, but at least I was here, in her lamplight, safe." It was more than 150 years ago when the dead woman's tortured spirit became a "prisoner on leave from the dungeon." Helen can not be seen, nor heard, nor felt, although her emotions can occasionally send "a ripple into the tangible world." During those years, Helen has cleaved to a series of unwitting hosts, learned through trial and error the rules by which she must abide in order to prevent a return to her hell, and has periodically chosen another acceptable and convenient person to haunt (preferably one with some tie to literature, which she so loves) for when her current host grows old and dies. The latest of Helen's hosts is an English teacher, Mr. Brown, and it is in his classroom that it happens: "Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead. I was with my teacher, Mr. Brown. As usual, we were in our classroom, that safe and wooden-walled box--the windows opening onto the grassy field to the west, the fading flag standing in the chalk dust corner, the television mounted above the bulletin board like a sleeping eye, and Mr. Brown's princely table keeping watch over a regiment of student desks. At that moment I was scribbling invisible comments in the margins of a paper left in Mr. Brown's tray, though my words were never read by the students. Sometimes Mr. Brown quoted me, all the same, while writing his own comments. Perhaps I couldn't tickle the inside of his ear, but I could reach the mysterious curves of his mind. "Although I could not feel paper between my fingers, smell ink, or taste the tip of a pencil, I could see and hear the world with all the clarity of the Living. They, on the other hand, did not see me as a shadow or a floating vapor. To the Quick, I was empty air. "Or so I thought. As an apathetic girl read aloud from Nicholas Nickleby, as Mr. Brown began to daydream about how he had kept his wife awake the night before, as my spectral pen hovered over a misspelled word, I felt someone watching me. Not even my beloved Mr. Brown could see me with his eyes. I had been dead so long, hovering at the side of my hosts, seeing and hearing the world but never being heard by anyone and never, in all these long years, never being seen by human eyes. I held stone still while the room folded in around me like a closing hand. When I looked up, it was not in fear but in wonder. My vision telescoped so that there was only a small hole in the darkness to see through. And that's where I found it, the face that was turned up to me. "Like a child playing at hide and seek, I did not move, in case I had been mistaken about being spotted. And childishly I felt both the desire to stay hidden and a thrill of anticipation about being caught. For this face, turned squarely to me, had eyes set directly on mind." So begins the teenage love story of the year, and a supernatural one at that. The young man who can see and hear Helen is Billy Blake, a human whose body has been taken over by a ghost named James at the moment its drug-addled teen owner checked out. The two main difficulties facing Helen and James are: Can Helen get a body of her own? What happens when you suddenly become a troubled teenager but are not familiar with those thousands of details about the life you've supposedly been living. Here this scenario takes on a whole different dimension from THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER. Alternating between sensual, gritty, dark, delightful, and frightening; between atmospheric fantasy and down-and dirty contemporary YA realism, A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT is absolutely awash in literary quality and an award winner waiting to happen. You'll be seeing this one on my Best of 2005 list later this year.