A Certain Slant of Light | 
| Author: Laura Whitcomb
Publisher: Graphia
List Price: $8.99
Buy Used: $2.78
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Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 4886
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 061858532X
EAN: 9780618585328
ASIN: 061858532X
Publication Date: September 21, 2005
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Condition: Bent cover, and pages
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 94 more reviews...
 Richie's Picks: A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT October 2, 2005
Richie Partington (Sebastopol, CA United States)
39 out of 47 found this review helpful
"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.
 NOT a Christian novel August 1, 2007
Sonya Mcelreath Ball (West Union, SC United States)
16 out of 44 found this review helpful
I am a teacher who was considering putting this book on my upcoming year's reading list. I would be hesitant to do so. While the prose is beautiful and wording is breathtaking in places, it seems that the author spent more time on developing word choice than the story line. I found the first third of the book difficult to get into; it really moves a bit slow. The only thing that really kept me going was the rhythm of the language. The concept was intriguing enough, but it just lacked the power to carry the story for long.
In order to understand the other issues I have with this novel, you must also know that I am a conservative Christian and live in a small, conservative community.
With that said, I thought the sex scenes were a bit too graphic for a book classified for young adults. There wasn't much left to the imagination, from sweat to straddling to the soreness between her legs. If the book had been written for an adult audience, I would not have the same gripes. But a parent of a 14-year-old may want to steer away from this one.
There was also some EXTREMELY explicit language. And, okay, I get that the characters developed through Mitch and his friends would probably not be polite and well-mannered, BUT I think it could be toned down a bit. I don't appreciate profanity on televison, and I don't appreciate it in literature, either.
But my biggest complaint is that Christianity is yet again stereotyped as a hypocritical, ignorant, male-dominating religion. The father "leads" his family in prayer and then commits adultery on the side. He is adamant about his daughter being modest, and then he looks upon her with some sort of desire after realizing that she's had sex. It's sick. I am REALLY tired of the media and popular culture depicting Christians in this light. True Christians are nothing like the people who are often represented as such on television, and in this case, literature.
In all, this is not an appropriate book for teens, and Christians are certainly NOT well-represented.
A Certain Slant of Light March 22, 2006
L. A. Stapor (mi)
13 out of 75 found this review helpful
C'MON PARENTS!!!! and students also, should beware of books that ADVERTISE that they have "explicit sex" in them...and LOVERS?! C'MON ON! IF WE DO NOT WANT OUR CHILDREN ENGAGING IN THIS TYPE OF BEHAVIOR (and one has only to look at statistics on rape, sexually active teans and pregnancy, let alone kids stressing out because they have issues put upon them that they are not ready to handle! hence, anger and rage and the outcome of that...) then it makes PERFECT sense to prevent them from reading about it as if it's perfectly OK and "natural"!
Publishers; get a clue and start rating your books like the movie industry does so we have a heads-up before we pull a book off the shelf...and don't tell me that adult literature is ok for a 9th grader, like this book says.
Keep our children children so they can be healthy adults!
Lyrical and Poetic November 8, 2005
Floyd Sklaver (Portland, OR)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
Perfection; Read in one Sitting! November 19, 2007
KDMask (Rochester, Planet Fab, NY)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
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