Heaven

What brings happiness to 14-year-old Marley, living in the town of Heaven? Summer unfolds with a job babysitting for Feather, trips to Ma's Superette for flip-flops, and a developing friendship with the perplexing Shoogy. Postcards arrive regularly from Uncle Jack and his dog, Boy. But Marley's world suddenly explodes and realigns when a letter arrives in the mail. In her Coretta Scott King award-winning book, Angela Johnson presents the poignant struggles of Marley as she comes to grips with the relationships in her life. Narrator Andrea Johnson treats the listener to all the emotions of a young adult--enthusiasm, dejection, tenderness, perplexity, and the craving for what might have been. Johnson's intensity leads both the listener and Marley to an understanding of what makes a family. A.R. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

August 31, 1998
As in her Gone from Home (reviewed above), Johnson here explores the themes of what makes a place home and which people family. Fourteen-year-old Marley's tranquil life in Heaven, Ohio, turns hellish the day her family receives a letter from Alabama. The note (from the pastor of a church that was destroyed by arson) requests a replacement for Marley's baptismal record, and reveals that "Momma" and "Pops" are really Marley's aunt and uncle, and mysterious Jack (an alleged "uncle" with whom Marley has corresponded but doesn't remember) is her true father. In this montage of Marley's changing perceptions, Johnson presents fragments of the whole picture a little at a time: images of people, places (the Western Union building "1637" steps away from Marley's house) and artifacts (a box filled with love letters between her birth parents) gain significance as Marley begins to make sense of the past and integrate her perceptions into her new identity. The author's poetic metaphors describe a child grasping desperately for a hold on her reality ("It was one of those nights that started to go down before the sun did," she says of the evening the fateful letter arrives). The melding of flashbacks and present-day story line may be confusing initially, but readers who follow Marley's winding path toward revelation will be well rewarded. Ages 12-up.