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Summary
Summary
Timeless, beautiful, and haunting, spirals connect the four episodes of The Ghosts of Heaven , the mesmerizing new novel from Printz Award winner Marcus Sedgwick. They are there in prehistory, when a girl picks up a charred stick and makes the first written signs; there tens of centuries later, hiding in the treacherous waters of Golden Beck that take Anna, who people call a witch; there in the halls of a Long Island hospital at the beginning of the 20th century, where a mad poet watches the oceans and knows the horrors it hides; and there in the far future, as an astronaut faces his destiny on the first spaceship sent from earth to colonize another world. Each of the characters in these mysterious linked stories embarks on a journey of discovery and survival; carried forward through the spiral of time, none will return to the same place.
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Author Notes
Marcus Sedgwick was born in East Kent, England. He is primarily a young adult author. His books include She Is Not Invisible, White Crow, Revolver, and The Ghosts of Heaven. He won the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award for Midwinterblood. His first adult novel, A Love Like Blood, was published in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Like Sedgwick's Midwinter Blood (rev. 3/13), The Ghosts of Heaven revolves (an apt verb) around a visual image -- in this case, the spiral or helix. The novel comprises four related stories, and the four parts are divided into quarters -- one for each turn of a full spiral revolution. The stories range chronologically from the prehistoric past; to rural Britain at the end of the witch hunts in the eighteenth century; to the early twentieth century, at an insane asylum on Long Island; and finally to a spacecraft in deep space and the distant future. In each, the image of the spiral is associated with violence, death, and horror. In the first three tales, it appears that "what goes around comes around"; almost from the first words, violent death is inevitable and predictable. Not until the final quarter, "The Song of Destiny," in which the story's sections are numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, do we and the protagonist begin to see that the spiral movement through space and time makes repeated patterns, but is always moving forward. The conceptual elements of this final story are satisfyingly brain-teasing, which helps to compensate for the novel's distant narrative voice and stiff characters. deirdre f. baker (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
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) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*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 nothing Sedgwick 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 marks handprints 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 story for 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 shape as a powerful sign, a healing comfort, a menacing horror, a frightening message he also imparts its beauty and power with a growing sense of awesome terror, as if the more we contemplate the beautiful, infinite spiral, the harder it is to bear. This is profoundly heady stuff, and Sedgwick twines the threads together effortlessly in sparely written, gorgeous lines that tug at something deeper than heartstrings. It's a graceful exploration of a sometimes comforting, sometimes distressing mystery of the universe, and the unsettling combination of meaning and emptiness will linger long after the last page.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AS DISCERNING READERS are well aware, some of the most interesting fiction currently being written is published under the catchall category of young adult - a term that encompasses such a diversity of work as to be nearly meaningless, but that does suggest a book's concerns will focus primarily on the doings of adolescent characters (though, as we shall see, even this definition does not always hold true). The young adult fiction powerhouses Holly Black and Marcus Sedgwick are masters of the genre, with well-deserved reputations for pushing it to its limits, and both writers' newest books ably demonstrate that the line between young and adult is fluid indeed. Black, who previously detoured among the glamorously undead in "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown," returns to the world of the Fair Folk in "The Darkest Part of the Forest," a wickedly entertaining mashup of genre conventions and enthusiastic subversions in which the perennial adolescent desire to be seen as normal takes on a whole new meaning. Hazel grows up with her beloved, more socially adept and musically gifted brother, Ben, in a small town where humans live in blasé coexistence with a variety of mythical creatures. Thanks to their location, the siblings' teenage woes range from the mundane (does the cute boy like me back, why are my parents so weird?) to the fantastical (why have the normally placid fairies who live in the woods begun to predate upon my peers?). Though the novel's plot verges on convoluted at times, its real delights lie in its main characters' relationships. Hazel and Ben's twinned sibling rivalry and love is beautifully complex, and their relatable human yearnings for the objects of their affections anchor the novel in the believable, despite the fact that said passions are for a comatose enchanted prince and a fairy changeling. What begins as a freewheeling romp becomes, in Black's capable hands, a genuinely moving meditation on grief, falling in love and growing up. "Mortality is a bitter draught," one of the fairy characters informs another when he demands to be allowed to live and love among mere mortals. "And yet I would have the full measure," he responds, a phrase that will strike home in anyone who's ever struggled with the pain and beauty of navigating the difficult, messy and glorious human world. SEDGWICK IS KNOWN for his bold experimentation with form, as in the Printz Award-winning "Midwinterblood," which featured seven linked stories that work backward through time. He once again takes an unconventional approach to the young adult novel in "The Ghosts of Heaven." The book has virtually no young adults. Divided into four sections, it explores a web of connections among a prehistoric girl, a woman accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, a mad poet supervised by a bumbling but well-intentioned doctor, and an astronaut hurtling through the future on a ship that may or may not be populated by ghosts. The novel's quarters are loosely interlinked. Each main character shares a hunger for knowledge, and an eerie series of cave paintings echoes throughout the book nicely. Sedgwick is also interested in spirals: The motif repeats obsessively throughout, whether it's a spiraling funeral dance in the second quarter or the astronaut narrator of the fourth quarter observing that his spacecraft is traveling "in a spiral, a helix through space" - and, as it turns out, through time. Sedgwick's puzzle-piece conceit is intriguing, and at its best - particularly in "The Easiest Room in Hell," a deliciously creepy homage to H. P. Lovecraft complete with a prophetic lunatic and a sinister figure emerging from the sea - this sense of mystery propels the novel forward. Ultimately, however, the book raises questions it does not seem able to answer, and Sedgwick's spirals may not be enough to support its architecture. The helix never coheres into a meaningful symbol, leaving the reader with the sinking suspicion that she is meant to mistake murkiness for depth. SARAH MCCARRY is the author of "All Our Pretty Songs" and "Dirty Wings." Her third novel, "About a Girl," will be published this summer.