Shadows in the Moonlight

Do you remember this song?  Great song.  My favorite Canadian.  A Cool Moonlight is by one of my most favorite authors, Angela Johnson.   Sadly, I just didn't "get" this book.  Here's what I put on goodreads.com:  I love Angela Johnson so much that I feel that I need to explain such a low rating. I just didn't understand this book! I know that it had much deeper meaning than I could find. My meh feeling about it is solely "operator error" because I know that when Johnson puts pen to paper, she is magic.
Lila was born with xeroderma pigmentosum, which I really didn't know about until I read What We See at Night.  
I love Lila's family.  Her sister is wonderful and so are her parents.  And so is her best friend.  I just didn't get the friends who visited Lila at night.  I thought maybe they were angels of death or something, but they weren't.  Maybe I will read this again someday and figure it out.  I'd love for someone to read it and explain it to me, because I know that it is meaningful, I am just to dull to understand it!  

A Little Bird Told Me

Bird is a short and sweet slice-of-life novel from the wonderful Angela Johnson.  Bird is thirteen and runs away from home when her step-father leaves her and her mother.  She hopes to find him and convince him to come back to them.  Along the way she meets two boys who are tired together but don't know each other.  A great little book from a great author.

So when you see it is written by Angela Johnson...

Even before you finish it, you KNOW it is going to get 5 of 5 stars.  That's just the kind of writer that Johnson is.  This book should win the Printz this year, but it won't because it is too good.  Poet, honest, real, different, heart-breaking, beautiful, that's A Certain October.
The book chronicle's Scotty's life during the month of October when she is on a train and a boy she sort of new from school is killed in a terrible train accident, which also leaves her little brother in a coma.  Scotty is a wonderful character and all of the supporting characters are as well.  Less than 160 pages, this sends the message again to people like Stephen King- it's not about the number of words or pages, you have to actually SAY something.

Short and So Sweet

As I have said before Angela Johnson can tell a beautiful story and she can tell beautiful short stories.  And I can't say I've ever read an Angela Johnson story that I didn't like.  Some of these I truly love.  A ginormous smile would just appear when I would come to the last line of many of these, here in Gone from Home.  Literary and lovely.  Read the book, only 101 pages, but it should take you a long time, because you'll want to treasure each sentence.  Seriously.

Angela Johnson = 5 Stars

Another breath-taking book by Angela Johnson.  Looking for Red is the story of Mike (Michaela) and the loss of her brother, Red.  Red went out into the ocean one day and never came back.  The story is set on Cape Cod and you can FEEL Cape Cod all through it, even though Johnson doesn't bore everyone to death with a million and one details about every little thing in the whole world.  Johnson chooses her words artfully, carefully and her books pack a wallop.  This book is a mystery, a story of faith, a story of love, friendship.  Just a classic.