Alice Hoffman: Green Angel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This book quite fooled me. There wasn't anyone who had recommended nor mentioned it to me at all. Rather, after signing into PaperBackSwap one day I was taken by it's interesting cover. Please refrain from throwing your shoe at me for judging a book by it's cover. I opened another tab and headed to LibraryThing where I researched the book.

It's published by Scholastic. So is Harry Potter, I told myself. It was as I guessed, a Young Adult fantasy. I saw some teens I know have the book but moved on to see more about the book. It was what sounded like a touching book about healing. Okay. I requested it.

I received it in the mail. What is this? I was confused and couldn't determine what book it may possibly be as I went in search of a pair of scissors. It was rather thin. I opened the package and there was Green Angel. All one-hundred and sixteen pages of it. Now I had truly expected something much thicker. No where had I seen this book was quite thin. A little disappointed, I set it aside on a bookshelf, not among my newly acquired books.

I remembered this book which I only received last week and picked it up on Friday. It was a short book, but I had time to kill and was feeling too down for a deep and thick book that required a lot of thinking. Immediately upon opening it I found it had been stamped by it's previous owner with a little monster from the book Where the Wild Things Are. Turning the pages twice, I came across this enchanting looking layout:



I began to read and found not much of any conversation in the book but the writing was smooth and it kept my interest. It told the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Green who loved and had a knack for growing things in her family garden. It told about her love for her family and most strongly for her younger sister, much the opposite of Green but a good sister nonetheless. It went on to tell how, as the back cover will tell you, embers flew from the sky one day and took her family away.

Nothing is green anymore. The ground is dead with ashes. Green is, figuratively speaking, dead to some things as well. This short little story had a lot in it, though. There is a lot about finding strength, learning to live without those you've lost and how to move on, as well as finding a new life. Perhaps we should say rather than to simply not judge a book by it's cover to not judge a book by it's size.