Author: Laura Whitcomb
Publisher: Listening library
Rating: WARTY!
Read endearingly (for the most part) by Lauren Molina.
Note to Laura Whitcomb: the thing which Neptune holds in his hand is a trident, not a triton - unless, that is, you're trying to suggest that Neptune sports a fellow god in his hand....
WARNING: DIABETICS SHOULD UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES PARTAKE OF THE ENDING TO THIS NOVEL - IT'S FAR TOO SUGARY!
Note right up front that this is the first of the "Light" series, yet another YA series, because we don't have anywhere near enough of those out there, do we? Just so's you know what you're letting yourself in for! This is one of at least a dozen novels with this same title - or a title very similar - so be careful what you pick off the shelf! It's also rather explicit sexually, too, so it's not necessarily for the younger end of the YA range (which inexplicably runs from 14 - 24).
The story begins with a ghost which is well over a century old, and which is always on the verge (for reasons unexplained, at least to begin with) of being dragged down into hell. The only way the ghost can avoid this is to haunt a living person (again for reasons unexplained) - and by this, I don't mean haunt in the traditional sense. The people the ghost chooses are unaware of the fact that they're being parasitized.
Once this is done, the ghost is safe from being dragged down, but the price is that it must stay within a relatively short distance of the 'host' person otherwise it hurts. This is very much appropriated from the daemon-person relationship in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, except in this case they're decidedly one-sidedly abiding by.
The ghost in this case is a young woman named Helen. What it really means to identify as female when you're not in an actual body is debatable, but no such debate is held in this novel. Indeed, the ghost is exactly like a flesh human being, except that there's no flesh, so that's weird to begin with. Having neither flesh nor skeleton, nor muscles, how it can even move is, again, unexplained. The ghost can see and hear perfectly well, but cannot taste, touch, or smell. Again, no explanation is offered for this specialization in sensory apparatus, but what this does mean is that we're not dealing with anything new or original here! It your bog standard, common-or-garden, clichéd trope ghost just like in pretty much every other ghost story you've ever read or that's ever been written.
The bottom line is that we get neither information, nor even speculation about what the ghost is: spirit, soul, energy? We don't know, and this is important for later events. We do get a summary of how the ghost spent the last century or so, but no real details. It's only at the very end of the novel that we find out how Helen ended up dying, and the ending is so sugary you will wretch as she did. The ending makes zero sense and it's quite simply stupid.
Another huge problem with this story is that Helen, the ghost in question, is pretty much exactly like a modern teenager. This is despite spending well over a century as a ghost! Helen relates that her birth predated the US Civil war, which means that she's somewhere in the vicinity of 150 years old. She didn't even die as a teen - she died at age 27, and was a married woman with a child when she died. Contrast this with her current behavior in which she acts exactly like a fifteen year old, which is convenient, because that's the age of the flesh-and-blood body which she steals. In this regard this is exactly the same kind of situation found in the ridiculous Twilight series (which I flatly refuse to read), where we have an 800-year-old (or whatever) vampire who not only looks like a high-school kid, but behaves exactly like one.
Again just like in Twilight, Helen finds a younger person with whom to fall in lust, but there's actually a bit of a twist here, because the younger person, although inhabiting the body of a teen, is (or was) a ghost just like Helen. The difference is that he has discovered that he can 'take-over' the 'vacant' body. In his case, 'vacant' is defined as a drug-addicted boy who was on the verge of dying from an overdose. The boy's 'spirit' vacated the body (why isn't explained), but the body did not die (again, why isn't explained), and James was able to 'assume ownership'!
It's this meat squat that he's occupying which allows him to see our main character. It's the first time he's ever seen another ghost. His name is James (although his body's name is Billy), and he's a century old (he was a soldier in his mid-twenties in World War One who died on the battlefield in France), so the discrepancy in ages is not as absurdly massive as in Twilight, but Helen is still half a century older than he is, by any measure. Despite this, both of them behave like, and have the libido of, the adolescent bodies they take over. It's completely unrealistic to the point of being farcical.
Typically this would turn me off the story, but I was listening to the audio book, and whether this made a difference or not, I can't say, not having read the text version. I found the reader's voice, while somewhat annoying from time to time, to be for the most part to be completely captivating. It was warm and engaging, with a nice, soft, mezzo-soprano timbre to it. The reader came off as a bit nervous here and there, and bit playful at other times, so it was really engaging for me. It was really nice to get this after so many audio books with really irritating readers.
Unfortunately, despite the pleasant voice, the story went completely off the rails. This happened when Helen wanted to get into a body to be able to interact with James just as she could with people when she was flesh-and-blood. She accomplishes this, after a false step or two, by taking over the body of a fifteen-year-old girl. Now this girl isn't dying. She's not an OD'd drug-addict like Billy was when James muscled in on his body. Jenny doesn't overdose; she doesn't get electrocuted, or drowned or anything else. Helen simply declares Jenny's body vacant and steals it for herself!
Frankly, this was nothing short of rape of the most appalling kind. It was a form of slavery an order of magnitude beyond anything which occurred during Helen's lifetime. It's an atrocious abuse (as the rest of the story reveals), yet Helen doesn't even bat an eyelid over it. Mild-mannered, shy, prudish, retiring Helen, who wouldn't say boo to a ghost, who was flesh at a time in history when gentility and deference were ingrained powerfully into young women, feels no compunction whatsoever about stealing Jenny's body from her.
Helen justifies this by declaring Jenny 'vacant' from some hollow vibe she gets from her body. She's described as 'empty'. This despite Jenny being a normal (if rather withdrawn and repressed) fifteen-year-old. She was living with her very strict religious family. They weren't fundamentalists in the derogatory sense, but they were strictly adherent, and tightly-controlling of Jenny, but not abusive (unless you count religious brain-washing as abusive, which I do, but that's not important to this story).
Now we can get back to the reference I made earlier about what the ghost actually is. In the case where James takes over Billy's body, the assumption which is thrust upon us (although the writing is so vague it's hard to be sure) is that his ghost - or his 'soul' had vacated his body, so he was effectively dead, a zombie, about to die physically as well as spiritually. Yet the body soldiered on. James was able to move in and take over, and the body recovered. Indeed, it recovered miraculously, because despite going cold turkey, this heavily-addicted long-term drug abusing body suffered absolutely no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever. I found that to be completely absurd.
That's not even the real problem from the PoV of this novel. The problem is the question of what exactly happened here. If the soul had left the body because it was dying, then how was James able to move in and set up shop? Why was he able to keep it going? If he was able to do so with zero effort on his part, then how come the original soul vacated the place? None of this is even addressed, much less explained. It's bad writing.
But it gets far worse when we compare this one to Helen/Jenny's case. Jenny wasn't even dying, so how do we explain the fact that her soul/spirit/ghost had vacated the body? If it had, then how come the body didn't die? How come Jenny was completely functional, carrying on conversations, eating meals, attending school, living, moving, and having her being? None of this made any sense whatsoever, and it's not even addressed, which is more bad writing. Helen has no qualms whatsoever about her actions, which is completely out of character for her. James's actions made some kind of sense (apart from the issues I've raised above), but Helen's did not.
But it gets worse. After Helen has robbed Jenny of her life, what's the first thing these two, one 150-some years old, the other a century old, do at their very first opportunity? They find a quiet place at school, and hop each other like bunnies. This is a girl from around 1875, and a boy from around 1915, completely shedding their origins, two people raised in eras of strict propriety completely dispensing with all propriety (and clothing)!
Now you can argue, if you like, that James was not only a guy, but also a soldier, and so probably had rather less restraint and inhibition than did Helen, but you cannot argue the same for Helen, since the author has already gone out of her way to make it abundantly clear what a prude she is, how retiring, restrained, inhibited, shy, withdrawing, and so on. Yet all of that is gone in an instant, both of them completely shedding everything, including clothes, no shyness whatsoever, no prudery in evidence, and screwing like two adolescents who had just had a radical inhibition-ectomy. It made. No. Sense. Whatsoever. This, for me, is where the story began to roll downhill under its own ponderous weight.
Since Jenny is fifteen and raised under strict religious rules, we can almost safely assume she's a virgin, but James was (as Billy) a heavy drug user, and he doesn't know squat about Billy or his past, so he cannot be sure he has no sexual diseases, yet he has no qualms about bedding this fifteen year old innocent body without even a thought, let alone a discussion, about condoms. Morons. And it's yet more bad writing that the author doesn't even think of addressing any of these issues.
The overall plot idea was really rather good. It was the execution of it which was full of holes. One major spoiler as an example: We learn early that Helen drowned, but we don't learn the details of it until near the end of the novel, and it's as dumb-ass as you can get. Helen is trapped in a flooding basement with her child. There's a window which is too small for Helen to get through, but out of which her child can scramble and walk way, yet this still sizable gap, big enough to fit a young child through, apparently doesn't let water through, because the basement continues to fill up to the ceiling and drowns Helen. Dumb. Ass. Stupid! Poorly plotted. Poorly written.
The moral of the story is trite - there is no hell: we make our own hell by worrying over the mistakes we made in life. Screw that. If there's an afterlife, then this life doesn't matter a damn, so I'm gon' party like it's 1666! And I won't spare a single thought for this saccharine attempt at a medal-winning novel.
