A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

Helen is Light. She can neither touch nor smell, nor taste the world of the Quick.  She may be unseen by the world of the Living, but she can hear and see their world with just as much clarity.  As captivating first lines go, Helen, who has not been seen for 150 years, has the alarming sense of eyes on her:

Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation when you’re dead.

It happened while Helen, like any other day, cleaved to her host Mr. Brown while he taught his high school English class.  She’d seen this unremarkable boy named Billy many times before, but now he could see her, and she finds herself drawn to him.  First impression terror aside, Helen quickly begins to fall in love with him, whose real name is James.  So begins her journey back into the land of the Quick, one of haunting secrets and troubled lives for both them and the young bodies they’ve come to possess.

From that beginning opening line, this book captured me. It’s pristinely beautiful.  From the clear, flowing prose and the premise of Light and Quick, A Certain Slant of Light is a lovely story about second chances and forgiveness – and a ghost story at that, a categorization I hesitate to use.  It instead had the feeling of reading an old, timeless classic of literature.  English literature is quoted and read often by Helen and her four hosts.  Laura Whitcomb has been an English teacher and you can sense the reverence she feels for poetry and nineteen-century English authors through the characters.  Helen herself writes poetry and loves to read.  All of her previous hosts – my Saint, my Knight, my Playwright, and my Poet as she endearingly calls them – were writers or lit appreciators of some sort, and she thought of herself as a muse to each, subtley suggesting words and ideas through her emotions and the little invisible notes she scribbled in their margins.   The internet, computers, and cell phones aren’t mentioned, even though we know it’s the twenty-first century.  James and Helen are of the world but not in it, and I felt that timelessness very refreshing.  This perhaps has been a digression but the literature feel stood out to me and made me connect even more to these two old souls who are bibliophiles just like me.  Eating up the writing and the intriguing, building mystery, I breezed through this lovely book until the understated, arresting ending came, one with hope for Billy and Jenny and one with flawless last lines that succinctly and beautifully tied up James and Helen’s story.  I have a feeling I’ll be returning to this book often.

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