A Certain Slant of Light

chibi_steph18 · Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:53 pm Post subject: A Certain Slant of Light

A Certain Slant of Light is a book by Laura Whitcomb. I bought this on a whim because it sounded interesting, expecting a good story but nothing really profound. Boy, was I wrong! I absolutely love this book, it is a beautiful love story, among other things. Here's a review for you:

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.
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I highly recommend this book to EVERYONE who enjoys love stories

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Sometimes I don't think birds are really talking to each other. They are just making fun of police sirens.
-Stephanie

Serenity · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 6:53 am Post subject:

Sounds good Steph, yet another to add to my everygrowing list arghhh now If I can just manage to catch the Library van for once!!

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