Green Angel / Alice Hoffman / 116 pages / Gardening May Challenge

Aurora and Green were two very different sisters.  Aurora was blond, beautiful, personable, and loved to dance.  Green was quiet, shy, patient, dark, a hard worker, and loved to garden.  On one of their family trips to the city, Green is left behind to tend the gardens and the home.  Tragedy befalls the city.  Ashe from the conflagration darkens the skies for some time.  Growing cycles are interrupted; many are dead, including Green's parents and sister; looters beset the survivors.  Green, who is just about to turn sixteen and begin her future, is forced to change into someone else.  She called her new self Ash.  She is almost completely blind; has tattooed most of her body; and has a talent - she can gauge "honesty from dishonesty, copper from gold, green tea from black, a friend from an enemy."  Unlike a classmate from school, Heather Jones, whom Ash had once envied, Ash was not "too busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future."  Through her generosity, Green is reborn. She made it happen.  She was the ink... This is an amazing story of the devastating effects of grief.  It is in reaching out to others, satisfying their needs, realizing their purposes and potentials, that the grief can be assuaged...  The dead do not leave us but remain a part of us forever...  Change is inevitable...