Book 2

Book: A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb
Date Finished: January 6, 2010
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Great story. Helen is a lost soul, a ghost who for reasons she doesn't remember was locked out of Heaven when she died over 130 years ago. Forced to cleave to a human "host" or be pulled into what she believes is Hell, Helen spends the years watching the world of the Quick, silent and invisible. When a human boy is able to see her one day, Helen is by turns terrified, shocked and intrigued. She meets James, a fellow Light who discoverd a way to inhabit the human Billy Blake, a troubled teen whose spirit left his body empty after a drug overdose nearly killed him.

The two quickly fall in love, and James urges Helen to make herself corporeal by inhabiting fellow teen Jenny after Jenny's spirit abandons her body in a desperate attempt to escape her controlling, hyper-religious parents. What at first seems to be the ideal situation - now James and Helen can be together both physically as well as spiritually - soon becomes a nightmare as the lives of their human hosts begin to cause problems for the young lovers. Too, memories of the past begin to surface, and both Helen and James realize they will have to face the painful horrors from their previous lives if they have any hope of ever resting in peace.

Helen is a wonderful protagonist, and I really wanted this couple to find happiness. Too, when things begin to unravel for James and Helen, the situation becomes extremely dire. At one point I wasn't sure how Whitcomb would tie up so many tragic plot threads, and the conflict and tension kept me turning pages late into the night.

While the main characters are ghosts, this is not in any way a creepy or scary book. I recommend it highly.

Updated Number of TBR books: 293

Next Book: The Off Season by Catherine Murdock

Summary:
This sequel to Murdock's Dairy Queen catches readers up with narrator D.J. Schwenk as she hits her stride in her junior year of high school. She's playing linebacker for her high school football team, hanging out with Brian (the rival high school's quarterback), earning passing grades, and pulling her weight on her family's struggling dairy farm. But "a whole herd of trouble" is coming her way. First, D.J. and, by extension, Brian become the unwitting subjects of a People magazine article. Then D.J. suffers a shoulder injury that threatens her sports career, her gay best friend runs away with an older girlfriend, and D.J. notices that Brian isn't too keen on being seen with her in public. These problems are all put into perspective when D.J.'s older brother, Win, suffers a serious spinal-cord injury during a college football game. D.J. stays by his side in the hospital, a task made even tougher by Win's refusal to communicate, and accompanies him to rehab in Minnesota.