The Raising: A Novel (P.S.) Review

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(More customer reviews)The author taps into the insular environment of a college campus and the public's fascination with the supernatural in an era when life beyond death offers an alternative explanation to the cold hard truth of an untimely loss. A year after sorority girl Nicole Werner dies in a car accident, her boyfriend, Craig Clements-Rabbit, still bears the blame, a myth quietly growing around the tragedy, stories of the blonde-haired beauty still tethered to the earth, her apparition sometimes caught briefly by on campus. Returning to his Midwestern campus, a still- distraught Craig is conscious only of his profound loss. To counter Craig's obsession, his roommate, Perry Edwards, signs up for a class with Mira Polson, professor of cultural anthropology, to study the rituals of death, cultural explanations for afterlife manifestations and entrenched superstitions that the dead can indeed rise and walk the earth. Meanwhile, the only witness to the incident, Shelly Lockes, cannot fathom why the local newspapers misrepresented the facts of the accident, entirely ignoring her eye-witness account of the tragedy.
In a strange confluence of disparate perspectives, including that of Nicole's sorority sister, Josie Riley, Kasischke fashions a compelling tale where imagination morphs with reason, a murky landscape in which the lost Nicole both haunts and comforts. Of course, logic dictates a reasonable explanation, the author presenting the story characters' memories and interactions, that don't quite fit together smoothly. Set in the college's Godwin Honors Hall, these relationships are by nature claustrophobic, the reports jarring in their inconsistencies, the perfect breeding ground for otherworldly suppositions. Plausibility is left for the reader to decide. In prose that evokes that middle ground between logic and imagination, a youthful demographic is happy to participate in the making of a myth, an acceptance that the impossible may be possible. No matter the final resolution, the ambiance of what-if permeates Mira and Perry's determination, Shelly's frustration and Craig's innocent embrace of true love. Though somewhat long- and eventually obvious- Kasischke pulls through, reminding us of life's impermanence and death's inevitability. Luan Gaines/2011.


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