I’m a big fan of Sharon Creech and have read almost everything she’s ever written. I love her lyrical, creative use of language and her endearing characters. Her new book The Unfinished Angel (HarperCollins, 2009) is a short masterpiece with characters that you can’t help but love.
There is an angel that lives in the tower of the Casa Rosa in a tiny village in the Swiss Alps. She flishes, and flooshes, beaming warm thoughts on “peoples.” But she’s uncertain what her mission is. Is she an unfinished angel?
In moves Zola Pomodoro. Zola is “skinny like a twig-tree, with hair chip-chopped in a startling way” and her eyes are “gray with large black poppils in the middle.” And as you can see from this quote, one of the charms of this book is its delightful coined words, words like “attractiful,” ”impressifies,” and “explaterate.”
Zola is a happy gypsy of a girl with a spirit as bright as the peacock-colored skirts she wears. Zola is one of the few people that can actually see the angel, and, chippy-choppy quick, Zola gets that angel hopping to help solve some of the town’s problems.
The angel doesn’t much like being bossed around: “I do not like it when peoples tell me I have to do something. It makes me want to not do the something.” The angel worries when Zola tells her that the angel is supposed to know everything: “I am? This is a little shock to me. No, it is a big shock. Because I am not knowing many, many things.”
But in the end the angel says, “Zola, she is intrigueful to me. In her many-layered clothings, with her chippy-choppy hair and the eyes with the big black poppils, in her sometimes bossy way, she has also the soft heart of a bunny. The soft heart is also a smart heart because it is not soft for every puny silly thing, but over the things that are matterful.”
Zola is an unfinished angel. Aren’t we all?
