REPOSSESSED

Seventeen-year-old slacker Shaun steps off the curb and is smacked by a cement-mixer truck. Just before he goes under, a curiously sneaky “archangel” named Kiriel steps into Shaun’s body. Thus begins Kiriel’s near doe-eyed exploration of all the weird, whacked-out wonders of teenage boyhood, all of which eventually coalesce into the pursuit of friendly, feisty Lane Henneberger, the girl he knows will give her virginity to him. The infusion of Kiriel’s inquisitively dogged personality into Shaun’s teenaged body humorously amplifies all of Shaun’s usual boy instincts: Lust, hunger and love all spring to the center, most affecting when Kiriel’s educated near-Shakespearean words spout forth from Shaun’s usually blunt and blasé lips. Life, of course, gets better for Shaun, complete with a girlfriend, help for his troubled brother and better grades. Jenkins’s writing, for all of her dabbling in the supernatural world, remains lean, mean and to-the-point. Though the replacement of a real boy with a do-gooder, lackadaisical demon makes this effort feel less directly urgent, less real than Beating Heart (2006), Kiriel’s own search for meaning and direction from his own realm in this new life packs an intriguingly deep wallop. (Fiction. YA)