Grass Angel

THIS IS A DEF. READ!!! I read this and couldnt put it down! Parents get up and go get this book because you'll love it and your kids will too. I want my kids to read something thats not about sex and bad things so i got this and i loved it and so did my kids so i would say that you should go get it!!

When I first started reading the Grass Angel, which I had purchased earlier in the day for my grandson, I was lying in bed late at night and figured I would just check it out before falling off to dreamland. I started turning the page, and another page, and another. After a while I wasn't aware of anything but the story spinning off...to where? Yes, the tale was one that would grab and delight a sixth grader, but there was a complexity that was so real, so thick with emotion and confusion and... I was totally with this kid, wondering what kind of a parent would take off like that. Uh, oh. Didn't my wife and I leave our oldest son on his own at probably the same age. But not with an aunt who was so bizarre, so dysfunctional, so totally unsympathetic. Then the transformations. The daughter...the mom...and that wizard of an aunt. Hey, this was not just a kid's book. This was a book to delight any adult and to educate us all to the power of possibility and change.

Washington Post (4/18/04): Book of the Week:Perhaps this has happened to you. Your parents say they are going somewhere. Youdon't want to go. They say that doesn't matter, you're going. You say they can't make you. They say, okay, they'll go without you! Usually one of you gives in. But not 11-year-old Frances Cressen... Nothing about the summer, or her life, is turning out like aunt, not her mother, not even herself. With everything falling apart, the question is whether she and her family will find the wisdom, and the love, that it will take to put it all back together.

What are you gonna do if your mother wants to wreck your life? She's "searching for herself" in the faraway commune, so Frances gets to spend the summer with her weird nerdy aunt Blue. But somewhere along the way, her good intentions toward Everett, her little brother who had to go with mom, turn to crisis when the money she sent him becomes his getaway stash. Terrific writing that will inspire you to write, great characters, this one should be a perennial read aloud for end of the year 6th graders.