A Certain Slant of Light
by Laura Whitcomb

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 Da 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 manqu -- 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 astonishing 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.

School Library Journal:

Helen died 130 years ago as a young woman. Unable to enter heaven because of a sense of guilt she carried at death, she has been silent and invisible but conscious and sociable across the generations. Her spirit has been sustained by its attachment to one living human host after another, including a poet and, most recently, a high-school English teacher. While she sits through his class one day, she becomes aware of James and he-unlike the mortals all around them-is aware of her as well. James, who also died years earlier, inhabits the body of a contemporary teen, Billy.

James and Helen fall in love, he shows her how to inhabit the body of a person whose spirit has died but who still lives and breathes, and the two begin to unfold the mysteries of their own pasts and those of their adolescent hosts. Jenny, whose body Helen now uses, is the only child of strict religious parents who controlled her beyond what her spirit could endure. Billy's spirit left his body after a string of tragedies resulting from drug abuse and domestic violence. James and Helen court in both modern and old-fashioned ways; here is a novel in which explicit sex is far from gratuitous or formulaic. Whitcomb writes with a grace that befits Helen's more modulated world while depicting contemporary society with sharp insight. In the subgenre of dead-narrator tales, this book shows the engaging possibilities of immortality-complete with a twist at the end that wholly satisfies.

Horn Book Review:

"Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead." So begins Whitcomb's original, opinionated, sexy, and romantic novel of the afterlife. Helen is a disembodied spirit who seeks to escape the hell of her dark icy drowning by "cleaving" to a series of human hosts; after 150 years, she meets fellow marooned spirit James, who has taken over a vacant body (that of teenage screw-up Billy, who failed to return after a drug overdose). James and Helen fall in love, and James persuades Helen to enter a body of her own (that of Jenny, who has been driven to "wander in limbo" in order to escape the constricted life imposed on her by her ultra-controlling fundamentalist Christian parents). Whitcomb is unfailingly insightful, whether contrasting twenty-first-century teenagers' mores and means of communication -- mostly shrugs and thoughtless profanity - with Helen and James's old-fashioned speech and courtship, or skewering the oppressive sterility and hypocrisy of Jenny's household. Having sailed through establishing her original premise, Whitcomb successfully navigates a complex plot that after many dramatic turns is resolved both cleverly (in the case of providing Billy and Jenny with a continuing relationship after they each return to their bodies) and happily. "Just walk up to your hell and give it a push," James tells Helen, and together they find their own heaven.

Publishers Weekly:

First-time author Whitcomb infuses Gothic romance with modern-day drama to create a highly sensual, supernatural story of two spirits caught in purgatory. The body of Helen perished 130 years ago, but her soul still roams the Earth, cleaving to humans who share her love of literature. In all those years, Helen has never seen anyone else who is "Light," until she meets James, who has possessed the body of an 11th grade student. Knowing at once that they are meant to be together, Helen allows James to teach her how to enter the body of an "empty" teenager, not knowing what complications lie ahead. Posing as Jennifer Ann, the daughter of fundamentalist Christians, Helen finds herself trapped in a sterile household void of art and literature with little chance to visit James, who lives in a run-down house with a violent older brother. Meticulously wrought descriptions of the ghosts' feelings and actions allow readers to experience the physical sensations of Helen and James as they rediscover the pleasures of taste and touch and re-experience the suffering that is part of every human experience. Sexually explicit scenes and not-so-gentle jabs at hypocritical Christians may raise some eyebrows, but the author's poetic prose, capturing the spirit and sorrow of the two unearthly protagonists, will likely have a mesmerizing effect on readers.

Richie's Picks, Great Books for Children and Young Adults:

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.

Kliatt:

Told from the viewpoint of a ghost, the story is neither a typical ghost tale nor a typical teenage love story. The reader's fear does not drive the plot. Instead, we see the living through the eyes of the nonliving. Helen's new friendship with a teen underscores her sadness and loneliness. In this way, Whitcomb's descriptions and slow pace are more reminiscent of Anne Rice's vampire novels than of Stephen King's works. Older teens drawn to Rice's work as well as those who enjoy love stories with a twist will definitely want to read this insightful and unusual take on life and love.