A Certain Slant of Light (Paperback)

~ (Author) "SOMEONE WAS LOOKING AT ME, a disturbing sensation if you're dead..." (more)
Key Phrases: prayer corner, hook hag, lie whispered, Pastor Bob, Amelia Street, Billy Blake

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up–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.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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 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.

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

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Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Graphia (September 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061858532X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618585328
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (158 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #34,790 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Richie's Picks: A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT, October 1, 2005

By	Richie Partington "http://richiespicks.com" (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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"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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical and Poetic, November 7, 2005

By	Floyd Sklaver (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Laura Whitcomb has written a simply stunning book imbued with phrases as lyrical and poetic as any I've read. The story captured my imagination and the attraction between James and Helen was the perfect combination of adolescent yearning and mature desire. I couldn't put it down and am eager to read what Whitcomb produces next.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfection; Read in one Sitting! , November 18, 2007

By	KDMask (Rochester, Planet Fab, NY) - See all my reviews

This is one of my top 5 books of all time. I absolutely loved the story of Helen and her struggle to leave this world peacefully. I had no idea it was a young adult book until I saw the reviews on here! Anyone who enjoys unique, beautiful stories will devour this book. Told from a unique perspective and mingling with the living and dead, I couldn't put it down. The ending was wonderful. I'm buying it as gifts for all my 'bibliophile' friends. Kudos to the cover artist as well.