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Title: Green Angel by Alice Hoffman
Details: Copyright 2003, Scholastic Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "Left on her own when her family is lost in a terrible disaster, fifteen-year-old Green is haunted by loss and by the past. Struggling to survive physically and emotionally in a place where nothing seems to grow and ashes are everywhere, Green retreats into the ruined realm of her garden. But in destroying her feelings, she also begins to destroy herself, erasing the girl she'd once been as she inks ravens into her skin. It is only through a series of mysterious encounters with a ghostly white dog and a mute boy that Green relearns the lessons of love and begins to heal as she tells her own story."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I am a well-known and outspoken Alice Hoffman fan.
How I Liked It: Quick, think of your least favorite genre of books! It can be anything from a broad favorite of most people to something really niche, to a certain author you've heard praised and how despite your efforts, you've never gotten the appeal. What is it about that genre that makes you loathe it and are there any exceptions? If you've been reading this blog even casually, you'll know that crime fiction is some of my least favorite, but dystopian fiction is right up there as well. Why? Well, crime fiction seems to have more overused tropes than usual, and dystopian fiction can just be plain depressing to me, particularly when the last who knows how many years in the United States has felt a lot like dystopian fiction. So what does this mean for this novel, the first YA offering I've read of Alice Hoffman's? Just you wait!
Meet Green! Fifteen-year-old Green is a shy, quiet girl who lives with her parents and outgoing younger sister Aurora in an unusual, somewhat remote community. They make forays into the city to trade goods from their farm, and on one of these forays, Green stays behind. Her family never returns, lost to ash and fire, the same that scorches the earth of their family farm.
Green's family's storage of crops are raided by marauding looters (some of them kids with whom Green attended school) shortly after. The world is hideous and grey and Green's only company is her sister's dog, left behind along with Green.
In her grief and rage, Green chops off her hair, inks her skin with tattoos, and sews thorns to her clothes. She changes her name to "Ash" and slowly learns how to survive, giving everyone a wide berth. Ash achieves things Green never could, and her ferocity is both armor and anchor.
Gradually, though, in a slow hero's journey, Ash and Green become one as Green learns to heal and integrate Ash and move forward with new friends and a new path. She integrates and honors the past and looks to the future, healing.
If the last Alice Hoffman book I read felt incomplete and unfinished in some ways, this is stunningly whole. Its relatively short volume packs a big punch.
We get to know Green as an awkward teenager out-socialized by her little sister, and we truly feel her sense of agonizing loss and grief. The creation and progression of Ash feels perfectly natural and all the more haunting for it. As Green loses herself literally in her grief and survival, we feel that, too. In the hands of a lesser author, Green's journey back to herself could feel treacly, but in Hoffman's hands, it just feels warm and authentic. Even the garden slowly yielding crops again where it was once gray is so subtly done where it could have easily run to cloying. The fact this is a YA novel makes Hoffman's precision even more astounding.
I didn't know a great amount about this book when I went to read it; I only knew that it was Alice Hoffman, and that was enough. So when I found out this was a dystopian novel, I was a bit disappointed, but was willing to give it a shot. And I'm so glad I did.
What makes a least favorite genre of books appealing? An incredibly skilled author with a story so compelling it'll draw even you into the book.
Notable: This gave me serious Franchesca Lia Block vibes in places, but I can't quite tell if it's actually Hoffman's writing being that different in this particular book, or the fact it's YA in general (not that that matters). I'm going to lean into the fact both are authors of magical realism and are just more alike than I realized.
Final Grade: A
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