The Ghosts of Heaven

November 10, 2014
In a prehistoric era, a girl learns the secrets of the cave paintings that give her people their sustenance and identity. In 18th-century England, a priest campaigning against witchcraft and evil targets a young woman who inherits her mother’s role of a “gracewife,” drawing the village into the plot against her. At the beginning of the 20th century, a Lovecraft-inspired poet goes mad in a nightmarish East Coast asylum while a well-meaning student of “modern” psychology tries to help. And in the future, the steward of a deep-space colonization mission learns that his undertaking is rooted in a lie. This quartet of stories can be read in any order, readers are told, and they obliquely reference each other; a through-line exists in the mysterious and persistent imagery of the spiral, a central focus and fascination. Printz-winner Sedgwick (Midwinterblood) doesn’t shy from the tragedy inherent in human interaction; these are not cheerful stories, and their protagonists don’t fare well, although their deeds resonate in small ways through history. Readers who like untangling puzzles will enjoy parsing the threads knitting together this corkscrew of tales. Ages 12–up.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
Similar to Sedgwick's Printz Award-winning Midwinterblood (2013), four stories relate in elusive ways.Sedgwick calls these stories "quarters" and encourages readers to experience them in any order. If read in the printed order, they begin with the dawn of time in a story that uses spare verse to describe a cave-dwelling girl who awakens to the world through the spiral shapes she sees as she gathers magic for her people. The second story skips to pre-Enlightenment England and the heartbreaking story of Anna, who is accused of witchcraft after taking up her mother's "cunning woman" mantle. The fictitious journal entries of a Dr. James follow as this early-20th-century psychiatrist forms an unusual relationship with an asylum patient and leaves readers wondering who the true threat to society is. The quartet concludes with a science-fiction thriller in which Sentinel Keir Bowman, awake only 12 hours every 10 years, journeys on a spaceship scouting for new life. What openly draws these stories together is a spiral and spinning symbolism that presents itself through vivid details, from the seemingly mundane to literary references. Individually they conform to conventions; together they defy expectations as they raise questions about humanity and its connections to the universe and one another. Although Sedgwick gives a nod to teens, this complex masterpiece is for sophisticated readers of any age. Haunting. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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Starred review from December 1, 2014

Gr 7 Up-Like his Printz Award-winning Midwinterblood (Roaring Brook, 2013), the prolific Sedgwick's latest work consists of individual tales spanning centuries of time connected only by a single thread-in this case a shape; the spiral. From a mark scribbled in the dust by a girl of prehistoric times to the strands of the rope used to hang a medieval girl accused of witchcraft; from a poet plagued by madness who finds the spiral with its never-ending pattern horrifying to the one person left awake to watch over a ship full of sleepers in a state of suspended animation as they spiral through the universe looking for a new earth, each story carries a message of loss and discovery. Tying all four stories together is this one mysterious symbol, which can be found throughout nature in the shells of snails, the patterns of birds in flight, the seeds in a sunflower, and the strands of the double helix of DNA and comes to signify in these tales, a dance of death (and life). At once prosaic and wondrously metaphysical, Sedgwick's novel will draw teens in and invite them to share in the awe-inspiring (and sometimes terrifying) order and mystery that surround us all.-Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK

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Starred review from December 15, 2014
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Sedgwick is one of the most sophisticated, thought-provoking voices in YA novels, and like his Printz-winning Midwinterblood (2013), this presents a story told in pieces over a span of centuries. The four narratives here, which can be read in any order, are linked by the omnipresent spiral, which appears in art as a universally aesthetically pleasing form, in naturally occurring shapes, in mathematics, in astronomy, right down to our very DNA. What does it all mean? Maybe everything, maybe nothingSedgwick never seems to pick one, but that oscillation only adds to the haunting atmosphere. In the first section, a free-verse poem of dense syllables and vivid images, a prehistoric tribe lacking written language embarks on a ritual of the hunt, climbing into a mountain cave to conjure the magic that will protect them and call up the beasts that will feed them for a season. After disaster strikes, one young woman is the only one left to make the necessary ritualistic markshandprints on a wall in red ochre, each labeled with the unique symbol of its creator. Meanwhile, another tribe, ruthless and bloodthirsty, attacks her people. Is her untrained magic to blame? As she finds herself sitting alone in the cave in darkness, she contemplates the profound signifying power of the spiraling shapes she sees not only on the walls before her flame goes out but also in front of her eyes, a result of her brain generating visual signals in the pitch black. Spirals retain their magical powers in the second story, but that magic becomes increasingly dangerous. Anna, the daughter of the local cunning woman, took over her late mother's folk-healing practices, many of which involve spirals. But when a draconian priest arrives in their seventeenth-century English village, rumors quickly circulate that Anna is a witch. Her brother's epilepsy doesn't help matters, nor do the oddly mesmerizing charcoal spirals that show up around the village, and despite protestations from Anna's friends, the hysteria spins wildly out of control. Sedgwick offers a lightly Lovecraftian story in his third section, set in an innovative nineteenth-century mental asylum with a spiral staircase at the heart of the building. One patient there, Charles Dexter, seems outwardly sane, but when confronted with spirals, he becomes paralyzed by fear. Dr. James, the beneficent new assistant superintendent of the hospital, tries to rehabilitate Dexter, but the sadistic head of the asylum thwarts him at every turn. It is Dexter's fear, however, that is the true centerpiece of this storyfor him, the spiral represents the terror of infinity, the slow, inevitable slide into oblivion. That terror arrives at its powerful height in the final quarter, set in the future on a ring-shaped ship en route to a new earth. Keir Bowman is a sentinel on the century-long journey, waking for 12 hours every 10 years to monitor the ship's progress and life-support systems. But when, over the course of 40 years, he discovers that not only is someone killing off the passengers destined to populate the new earth but also that intelligent life somewhere nearby is emitting a signal (tied directly to the ratio demonstrating the spiral), he unspools a sinister truth about his role in the expedition and the future of humanity. Each story is linked only tenuously, emitting mere echoes in the others, but those tenuous links leave ominous gaps that are heavy with significance. The aesthetic beauty of the spiral is pivotal, to be sure, but as Sedgwick notes the ubiquity of the shapeas a powerful sign, a healing comfort, a menacing horror, a frightening messagehe also imparts its beauty and power...