Fair warning: I plan on spoiling Katie Williams’s Absent throughout the review. There isn’t a good way to review this one without going into the details that make it work, so if you don’t want to have the book ruined for you, come back once you finish. In short, this is a brilliant woven story about ghosts, death, grief, the afterlife, our impressions of ourselves and other people, and high school. It’s tightly constructed, masterfully executed, and leaves almost as many questions for the reader to answer as it provides solutions.

Paige fell off the roof of her high school in a freak accident, and she died when her head hit the cement protective lip of the building. It wasn’t the fall that killed her, but rather, the knock on her head. Now that she’s a ghost and sentenced to an afterlife at her high school, she’s watching in as her former classmates deal with losing her. Paige isn’t alone, though — she’s there with Evan and Brooke. Evan died years ago, and Paige has no idea who he is and he isn’t quite forthcoming about it. Brooke, though. Brooke is someone Paige knows well — it was Paige’s secret boyfriend Lucas who was there when Brooke overdosed in the bathroom. He couldn’t save her.

Paige, Brooke, and Evan sit in on one of the grief counseling sessions (as ghosts, of course) and it’s here when popular girl Kelsey lets slip that she knew Paige didn’t fall off the roof. That she jumped. In no time flat, the rumor spreads throughout the school, infiltrating every social clique there is — from the popular kids, to the burn outs, to the jocks, and more. Paige knows she didn’t jump. Paige fell when she turned too quickly to see Lucas talking with her teacher (they’d been on the roof for the infamous physics class experiment of dropping an egg without it breaking). But now that this rumor has spread, Paige is questioning whether or not her death was truly an accident or whether or not her death was precisely what Kelsey said. Because who starts a rumor like that about a dead girl?

Katie Williams’s Absent is magical realism. Maybe even straight-up supernatural. What happens outside of Paige, Evan, and Brooke’s perspective is entirely in the real world. This is high school. There are cliques. There are classes. There are people spreading rumors about others. But what happens inside Paige, Evan, and Brooke’s world is entirely in their ghost world.

So when Paige discovers that being a ghost means she can press into and inhabit the bodies of the living? Can she change the course of a rumor? Can she get to the bottom of what really caused her death? And more importantly, can she figure out that the labels she’s attached to people — burn out, jock, loser, popular girl — are merely labels and the people are actually much more dynamic and whole than she imagined?

Whenever someone thinks of Paige, she realizes she’s able to press into them. And it’s her former best friend Usha she pressed into first. She’s easy since she thinks about Paige a lot, and Paige is fascinated to know why it is Usha suddenly started hanging out with the weird religious kids. The ones who they’d always made fun of because they’d always come across so fake. What Paige discovers is that, while she’s inhabiting Usha, she can make her say anything. She IS Usha entirely. And all she needs to do to escape from that body is walk to the end of the school property line; that’s when Usha returns to being Usha and Paige is sent back to the roof to relive her death again.

It’s brilliant. The ghost can inhabit the bodies of people who are alive. Paige is marveled by this and knows now she needs to continue doing this. It gives her entertainment, no matter how sick it is.

And what better entertainment than to inhabit the body of mean, popular girl Kelsey and force her to experience life as a less-than-perfect girl? The trick is that Paige has to figure out how to get Kelsey to think about her, and she knows just how to do it — she needs to get Usha to paint the memorial mural at the high school for her and Brooke. That way, whenever anyone walks by, they think of her. It’s the ideal set up.

This is a lot of explanation of plot, isn’t it? But I’d like to note this book clocks in at 188 pages. And it’s not at all plot-driven. It’s character-driven. As Paige discovers this ghost talent, she finds herself learning that the people she went to school with — the people she was so quick to label and judge and throw into boxes — are actually a lot more complex than she’d ever given them credit for while alive. Readers work alongside Paige through these discoveries, and they become more and more important as she works toward figuring out the truth to her death.

One thing Paige starts discovering, though, is that some of the people she’s interacting with, with whom she’d interacted with regularly in her actual life, aren’t acting entirely right. Lucas, who had been her secret boyfriend (and yes, secret — he was a jock and for her, being seen with him was the ultimate bad thing because he was a jock), starts acting erratic. He floods one of the school bathrooms. He makes out with a freshman girl on the floor in the bathroom, right where Brooke had died. Paige also realizes that Wes, who had always been a creepy druggie in her mind, is actually a sweetheart. That he actually had real, authentic, non-shy romantic feelings for her. As a ghost, Paige is torn about this. Her images of people are shattering left and right, and she can’t do anything about it.

Except, this is where Williams’s book becomes not just good, but excellent.

The truth of the matter is that Paige isn’t the only dead person who can inhabit bodies. Turns out that Evan and Brooke can, too. When Paige mentions what she’s been doing to Evan, he becomes frantic. He realizes that Brooke has been using this talent to manipulate people in the same way that Paige had been manipulating people. Worse, though. Brooke’s out for revenge. Perhaps Paige didn’t fall. Perhaps Paige didn’t jump.

Maybe, just maybe, she was manipulated by Brooke.

Where Paige had finally come to discover not everyone is as they seem, she’s also come to the moment where she realizes that there are secrets between and among people, too. That death isn’t always the final answer. In other words, Paige had taken ghost Brooke at face value. Brooke had been messed up with drugs when she died, and it was Lucas who tried to save her. But it’s possible that Brooke’s afterlife involved a lot of jealousy of Paige and Lucas’s relationship. So rather than work through it, rather than forgive what happened, rather than get to the bottom of it, Brooke sought revenge on Paige.

Absent draws upon stereotypes, drags them out, reexamines them, then pushes them back into another shape. These are incredibly complex characters working through grief and loss. Paige, for all she tells us and shows us in the narrative, isn’t a princess or a great girl. She’s not entirely likable. What she’s doing as a ghost in pressing into other people — in what she did to change the course of other people’s futures and memories of her — is terrible. It’s awful. She’s seeking out unnecessary vengeance as a ghost just because she can. There’s an incredible line in the book that sort of sums this up, and it sort of sums up what Paige realizes about who she was in the real world (even if she’s not entirely acknowledging her role in doing this in the afterlife, too): “They walk on, oblivious. People want to believe bad things, I tell myself, glaring around at my classroom. They want to believe the most shocking story. They see you as the worst version of yourself.” And then pages later, there’s Paige having this moment: “This is it. Exactly what I’d engineered, exactly what I’d said I’d wanted. How is vindication supposed to feel? It should feel like the parts snap into place. It should feel like eating a bowl of warm, thick soup on a cold day. It should feel like suddenly you’re solid again.”

And that’s why when the moment comes and Paige learns her death was the result of Brooke seeking vindication, the story snaps into one whole and solid place. Because, despite what Brooke thought the revenge would feel like, it wasn’t. It didn’t change anything of what happened in her waking life. It didn’t change anything except take away the life of another person. Lucas was still who he was. Wes was still who he was. Now, there was just a Paige-shaped hole in the school. And Paige learns that wasting all that time seeking revenge as a ghost wouldn’t change the course of events that led her here, either. Death doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t. That’s why it’s so painful and why grief takes as many forms as it does. For people like Kelsey, it’s through rumor-spreading she deals. For people like Wes, it’s reliving the drawings he made.

For Paige, for Brooke, and for Evan? It’s accepting. It’s forgiving. It’s moving on and up.

Williams writes tightly, weaving all of these threads together seamlessly. Moreover, though, she incorporates very small details that add up to something much greater. The mural on the wall — the one Paige manipulated her best friend to paint — ends up playing a significant role in the story and in the resolution. But that mural is not what we as readers or Paige as a character ever suspect it is. It’s much greater. It’s about freedom and release and acceptance. It’s about moving up, rather than being stuck.

I haven’t talked a lot about why these three characters are stuck here, but it’s important. The three of them were suicide victims. There’s a small line early on about how being stuck in high school for eternity was like purgatory. The characters are forced to relive high school every single day. They’re forced to remember their stereotypes, their boxes, their moments of winning and their moments of losing. They’re forced to accept they can and will eventually be forgotten.

Because that’s Evan’s story.

Absent could be described, I think, as Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall meets Nova Ren Suma’s Imaginary Girls. Readers who dug either or both will like this. In some ways, Williams’s book reminded me a lot, too, of the Korean horror film Whispering Corridors — there are many similar elements about social status and death, though, as well as revenge. I think fans of J-horror would dig this because of the ghosts seeking revenge (and the brilliant prose in this book — there is a moment when a character off-handedly asks if there are ghosts in Japan and if they were the nice or not nice kind, which anyone who has ever seen J-horror knows the answer to). How scary is it to think about your body being inhabited by a ghost? How scary is it to think that something outside ourselves could be determining the course of our future?

This book, of course, is about how we are entirely in control of determining our future. But oh, how it gets there is so savvy, so slick, and so twisted. Absent takes what Williams did so well with building a mystery and a set of questionable characters in The Space Between Trees and imbues it with the sort of ghost story I love so much. Even though this is a short novel, it is not fast-paced nor should it be read that way. Take your time with this one because there is a lot to absorb.

Absent is available now from Chronicle Books. Review copy received from the publisher. 

You may remember I talked about this book a long time ago over at Word for Teens. I wrote about how sometimes, there are romantic male leads in novels that just work so, so well. Danny, in Daisy Whitney’s When You Were Here, is one I talked about specifically. He’s stayed with me in the months since I finished this book, and I have a feeling he’ll remain on my list of favorite male characters in YA for a long time. 

Danny’s mom, who has toughed out five years of cancer, wants to make it just long enough to see him graduate valedictorian from high school. But before that date comes, his mom dies. Devastated by the loss, as well as the loss of his father a few years before and the loss of his adopted sister who chose to move to China to rediscover her roots, Danny is angry, broken, and confused about what the future could possibly hold. And there’s also another complication, too: Holland. She’s the girl he’d been in love with forever and the girl who was in every way perfect for him. But their relationship ended much too soon and without any resolution. Danny was left in the dark when she suddenly disappeared from his life. 

Faced with big decisions about where to go from here, Danny chooses to figure out what it is that kept his mom going for so long. Why she continued to be hopeful and happy, even though her life was near the end. To do this, Danny decides he’s going to fly to the apartment they owned in Tokyo, meet the doctor who meant so much to his mother. This is also his chance to really think about what he wants out of his life. 

Along the way, Danny meets Kana, who helped take care of the apartment before his mom died. She’s quirky, she’s energetic, and she’s invested in making sure Danny makes the most of his time in Tokyo. It’s not at all romantic — which is a huge plus in my book — but rather, it’s Danny’s opportunity to rediscover the value and importance of friendship. 

Maybe most important was the twist in the story. That’s Holland’s story. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip down to the next paragraph. The reason Holland disappeared from Danny’s life was that she got pregnant. Since Danny had been the only boy she’d been with and their relationship hadn’t been going on that long and she had been on the pill, it was a reality she hadn’t quite wrapped her head around. What made it worse was when she went into early labor and when baby Sarah died. Danny is the only person not in the loop on this, and he learns about his daughter when going through his mom’s things in Tokyo. His mom had known about the baby, but she and Holland both chose not to tell Danny. It wasn’t a choice out of cruelty. It was done to protect him because he had already lost so much in his life. And the truth of it was that the entire situation was scary and heartbreaking for everyone involved. 

When Danny does get to meet the doctor his mother had invested so much in, not only does he understand the value and purpose of his mom’s life, but he has a moment and realizes what value his own is worth.

Whitney handles all of the topics in this book delicately and powerfully in equal measure. Danny’s voice is knock out, authentic, and it is pained. Danny is a boy of action — his feelings play out in the way he acts and the words he chooses to use. They’re not always kind and he’s not always rational. But these things happen the way they do because it’s how Danny works through his pain and his grief. It’s the way he begins to make sense of the world. This is why he chooses to get on that plane and go to Tokyo. It’s why he doesn’t simply DWELL in the anguish but rather, he works and walks through it, step by tortured step. Where the twist element came in, another author could have pushed the envelope too much, adding simply one more thing to the list of horrible things going on in a character’s life. But Whitney introduces and weaves this in so carefully and thoughtfully that it instead amplifies the core of who Danny, his mother, and Holland really are as people. 

Danny’s understanding of his mother’s fight — and his mother’s desire to quit the fight — comes to a head when he meets with the doctor to whom she claimed saved her and to whom she dedicated so much energy and belief. And boy, did I cry. Danny learns that choosing the time one lives and the time one dies was the central force of his mother’s hope, even in her battle with cancer. It’s philosophical without being pandering, and it’s spiritual without being spiritual (if that even makes sense). Whitney excels are imbuing the narrative with the Eastern and Western philosophy not only in how she structures the story and Danny’s journey, but even in the way that death and life are explored.

The writing in When You Were Here is sharp, searing, and noteworthy. It doesn’t take a back seat to the complexities of the story nor the complexities of the characters. I give huge credit, too, for how well-done the sex scenes in this book are. There is a great contrast in the sort of sexual relationship Danny has with Trina — it’s one where she is in control, where she calls the shots, and where she gets what she wants and he takes it because he feels so empty and broken from all of the loss in his life. It’s not Holland, and it’s not an emotional and deeply satisfying act of intimacy. When Danny and Holland reconnect in Tokyo, after laying bare all of the things that were keeping them at a distance, their intimacy is raw, powerful, and healthy. Danny is in it not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. And maybe what made it so good in that moment was that almost nothing is said at all about the mechanics. Because that didn’t matter.

I’ve read a lot of grief books, but without doubt, this one stands out. It’s so good it hurts to think about. My one qualm, and it’s something I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about, is that Danny does come from privilege. He’s able to head to Tokyo to a private and paid-for condo without issue. He has a home back in California that’s taken care of, too. These all make sense contextually, but they do require the reader to suspend belief a little. But the freedom Danny has — he’s done with high school and in that “what do I do now?” stage of life before making decisions about going to college or traveling — is completely believable, especially with all he’s been thrown in the recent months and years. 

Whitney gets bonus points for a great sidekick animal with Danny’s dog Sandy Koufax, and for those of you worried, the dog does not die. Pass When You Were Here off to readers who like foreign-set contemporary stories, who enjoy grief books, who enjoy romantic male lead characters, and those who want to fall into a story for a long time. This one’s been compared to Gayle Forman’s Where She Went, and while I don’t buy that comparison (besides both feature a male romantic lead), I do see how fans of Forman’s writing would dig Whitney’s novel. 

Review copy received from the publisher. When You Were Here will be available Tuesday.