My Life on Earth and Elsewhere — Peggy Payne

Sensing she's about to get bad news, Darcy, sixteen, feels herself—or her spirit, to be more exact—rise weightless, out of her body, lifting off the seat of the patio chair. How can this be happening? Her light-bodied airy self hovers high in a backyard tree. She is not alone! A beautiful teenage boy, shy as a deer, stands in the branches nearby. He sees her and vanishes—as she is pulled back into her body, again tight-packed in her skin. Her father is talking. Her parents are separating. She's stunned—the three of them always seemed special, unbreakable. Yet she's wildly excited by what just happened—though fears she's lost her family and her mind in the same afternoon. While her father is in his own religious crisis, she enters an entrancing spirit realm. Must she live a half-life in each of two worlds or must she make an impossible choice? Can the tree boy Risto ever pass as a regular guy? And what becomes of a young spirit being like him? In My Life On Earth and Elsewhere, Darcy has to find a way around barriers present since before the beginning of time.