Green Heart is the combination of two YA novels Green Angel and Green Witch by Alice Hoffman.
The day it happened, fifteen-year-old Green was angry and refused to speak to her family as they left. She had wanted to go with them to the city, but they needed her to stay home.
Her father, mother, and sister all died in the terrible disaster – leaving Green all alone, and plagued by the memory of her last moments with them.
She struggles to survive in a world turned topsy-turvy, a place where nothing wants to grow among the ashes. Green becomes one with the thorny, lifeless realm of her garden – but finds she must allow herself to open back up to life, to possibility… to magic.
Even though all she can see is pain.
Green Heart was a majestic read!
I read The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman years ago and was dumbfounded by it – so I had high expectations, and, my, were they reached!
The haunting, mournful, poetic sentences create an almost ethereal, atmospheric tone – a poem that goes on and on with grace and elegance.
As I read the Green Heart, or I should probably say absorbed, I hoped for a happy end, for healing, but I knew that anything Alice Hoffman created would be more complicated than that, more real.
Green Heart is a novel of lovely, wistful, staggering simplicity of words that brings a quiet power to this otherworldly tale. This is especially true when it comes to the allure and hypnotic pull of nature and animals (Animal lover, here!). There’s a sense of magic, of wonder, of hurt and hope intertwined.
Both Green Angel and Green Witch are beautiful, the sequel taking us deeper into a surprisingly revealing and exquisite story that is tonally the same.
If you’re a bit sick of reading about the apocalypse, various dystopias, that really just kind of depress you (I know that I have started to be), Green Heart is a refreshing read.
Here we have a book that is touching, transcends genres, and brings lightness to the dark.
If you haven’t already, you should definitely read Green Heart!
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