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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | CD YA Fic Whitcomb, L. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you're dead.
Though 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.
In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: For the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen-terrified, but intrigued-is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 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 woman 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 won't 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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Publisher's Weekly Review
By turns whispery, giddy and urgent, Molina's voice skillfully rides the emotional roller coaster of this gothic-style romance carried on by Victorian-era ghosts who come to inhabit nubile 21st-century teenage bodies. Helen, a passionate lover of literature who's been "light" since her death 130 years ago, has spiritually attached herself, invisible, to human hosts for decades. But when she is one day seen by a kindred spirit literally in James, a ghost now inhabiting a teen junkie's form, everything changes. Helen takes over the body of Jenny, the "empty" daughter of strict fundamentalist Christians. As humans, the two ghosts experience new sensations; they navigate contemporary social and romantic mores and also remember more about their own past lives among the living. The intriguing premise and eerie execution of this tale will arrest romance and ghost story fans alike. A few expletives and some graphic sexual encounters keep this firmly in the older listener category. Ages 14-up. (June) n (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) ""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. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 9-12. In sensuous prose, Helen, who has been dead for 130 years, describes what it's like to live as Light, clinging to a human host, then reentering an empty human body and becoming physically and emotionally attuned to the world. Helen is startled when she realizes that a student in her host's English class can see her. James, too, is Light, but he has taken over the body of Billy, who almost overdosed on drugs. Their joy at finding one another turns quickly to love, and James helps Helen locate an empty body that she can inhabit. Fellow student Jennifer seems the perfect choice, but the unhappiness in her fundamentalist family, as well as the chaos of Billy's household, mix uneasily with the pleasures the spirits are rekindling. Whitcomb writes beautifully, especially when she is describing the physical delights of sexual love and the horror the spirits endure as they fight through their personal hells to reach the other side. Unfortunately, her stereotypical portrayal of a Christian family is so unnuanced that it jars when juxtaposed with the rest of the writing. Still, in many ways this will be irresistible to teens. Watch for more from Whitcomb. --Ilene Cooper Copyright 2005 Booklist