“Someone was looking at me, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead.” Helen, who has been dead for more than one hundred years, remains attached to, but not of, the physical world by aligning herself with the soul of a living person. Currently that person is Mr. Brown, a high school English teacher. Helen is startled to realize that one of Mr. Brown’s students can see her. Then she learns that James is also a ghost. While Helen has attached herself to a soul, James has occupied the body of Billy, a teen whose soul fled his body during an overdose. Helen and James fall in love, fueled by a passion they cannot consummate because Helen is only Light. James urges her to become part of the physical world by occupying a body. He explains how it is done: find a person who has been hurt so deeply that her soul has fled. When Helen finally agrees, she ends up in the body of Jenny, a girl from a strict, conservative religious family who has been stifled beyond what her soul could bear. Now Helen is living Jenny’s life, which complicates things for her and James. They can express their love physically (although secretly), but they must deal with the consequences for the lives of the bodies they inhabit. Laura Whitcomb’s gripping, beautifully written, highly original story is ultimately about healing. For Helen, that not only means making peace with her own traumatic death 130 years before, but also working with James to reunite the bodies of Billy and Jenny with their wandering souls. (Age 13 and older)

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.