If the characters had all been white, it could have been exactly the same tale. Although Marley and her family are black, there doesn't seem to be anything at all about the black experience in the book. Side note: I did find it odd that it won the Coretta Scott King award. She has a difficult time coming to terms with this new reality.I loved this short little book. And her parents are actually her aunt and uncle. He seems to just travel around the country with his dog, Boy, as a semi-vagrant.But Marley's whole world is shaken to it's core when she learns that Uncle Jack is not her uncle, but her father. Marley's other important person in her life is Uncle Jack, who she's never met, but with whom she's corresponded by mail for many years. Her two good friends are Shoogy Maple, a rebellious teenager in a seemingly perfect family, and Bobby, a young man not a whole lot older than herself, who is raising a daughter on his own. I'm looking forward to sharing it with our community of readers.Marley is a 14-year-old girl who lives with her parents and brother in the small town of Heaven, Ohio. An endearing story about love, family, adoption and identity. While the issues are complex, the reader isn't overwhelmed by the themes. This novel is geared towards older elementary, early middle schoolers. The intimacy of Jack's letters to Marley and the immediacy of the present tense translates the emotion and conflict here in a particularly effective way. Through a combination of fragments of her past shared in Jack's letters, memories and her mother's personal items, Marley processes the news of who her real parents are in her time in her own way. The revelation about who she is a big adjustment.

He says it must be really hard to hate people you've loved your whole life. But her friend Bobby (a character from another Johnson novel, _First Part Last_) reminds Marley what hasn't changed: her family loves her and she has friends who support her.

Then one day, a letter from Alabama changes her life forever.

There's never been any real drama in her life in Heaven, a small town that lives up to its name. Marley lives with two loving parents and her brother, Butchy. Johnson I was eager to read more of her younger reader titles.

Heaven by angela johnson