Grim

April 30, 2012
Waggener won the 2008 Scholastic Art and Writing Award for an early version of this debut novel. It’s easy to see what the judges liked—brooding atmosphere, fresh descriptions, and an unusual and compelling rogue, Jeremiah. But prod those descriptions, and it becomes a question what their purpose is. Readers are told that the Stripling siblings—Rebecca, Shawn, and Megan—are grieving their mother’s death in a car accident; that Erika, the mother, is stuck in Limbo and longs for her children; that a bastard son would break every law of the afterlife to gain legitimacy. But particularity, insight, and emotional realism are lacking in these relationships and events, weakening their resonance and urgency. The characters are two-dimensional and schematic, defined by family relationships that have the static, predestined quality of dead myth. (Erika is a mother, and as a mother she wants her children back. That’s all readers really get from her.) The novel becomes an exercise in technique and allusion, with only glimpses of story. Ages 13–18.

May 15, 2012
As a human family tussles against bitter seraphim in the underworld, misery runs constant--never waning, never tempered. Waggener's debut opens with a cryptic prologue by mother-of-three Erika. A car accident sends Erika to the underworld, accompanied by Jeremiah, an adult rogue (neither seraph nor human). Jeremiah refuses to explain anything, including whether Erika's dead. He mutters arcane things and snaps when Erika doesn't understand. That this motif, of a controlling male who keeps a woman in the dark, is common doesn't make it any less infuriating; that Erika falls for Jeremiah is predictable as well. What makes no sense is Erika's demand that her children join her--as if people could travel to Limbo alive and unharmed. She visits them in dreams, unconcerned that those dream-visits are nightmares to them. Erika's 17-year-old and 18-year-old sometimes narrate as the unrelentingly dismal plot moves through drowning, stabbings, metaphorical rape and breathless chases. The youngest child dies more than once. Generations-long sourness infuses both Erika's family (alcoholism, abuse) and the seraphim (marital infidelity and a bastard child; black pages with white font tell Jeremiah's parents' thread). Limbo is a city slum. Moreover, although young-adult literature has no cemented definition, casting two of four protagonists as adults--Erika's in her 30s--firmly removes this particular text from teen concerns. Grim indeed, without respite, often without rhyme or reason. (Horror. 16 & up)

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July 1, 2012

Gr 9 Up-On her way home from work one night, hardworking mom Erika Stripling meets a man in a convenience store and shortly afterward, she dies in a car crash. She wakens to find herself in a strange and threatening otherworld, accompanied by Jeremiah, the man from the store. He claims to want to help her, but she is unsure of his motives and desperate to see her children. As Erika becomes embroiled in Jeremiah's power struggles with the hierarchy of the otherworld (he is the illegitimate son of the king and is being threatened by his legitimate siblings), her three children-rebellious Rebecca and responsible Shawn, both teens, and 8-year-old Megan-struggle to come to terms with their mother's death. Soon, they, too, find themselves in land between life and death, pursued by ghosts and supernatural hounds, but also aided by mysterious figures West and Baba Laza, as they try to find their way to their mother. Using descriptive and evocative language, Waggener constructs a complicated mythology that includes elements of Christian theology, Greek myth, and folktales. The vision she constructs is darker and more pessimistic than depictions in comparable YA titles about life after death, such as Gabrielle Zevin's Elsewhere (Farrar, 2005). Much like Erika and her children, some readers might find themselves confused by the complexities of the gradually unfolding plot and mythos.-Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ

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