Children's Book Review: The Unfinished Angel

The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech (Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, $15.99, 9780061430954/0061430951, 176 pp., ages 8-12, October 2009)

What might an angel sound like if it had spent hundreds of years in the Casa Rosa tower in Ticino, a town nestled in the Swiss Alps, speaking mostly Italian and is now attempting to speak English? For starters, that angel might describe Mr. Pomodoro, the American who now occupies Angel's beloved Casa Rosa as "tall and linky," and his daughter, Zola, as "skinny like a twig-tree, with hair chip-chopped in a startling way." Zola wears layers of skirts and bright colors and "rainbows of ribbons on her wrists and ankles and neckle." There's a charming logic to Angel's invented words: Angel--who narrates--thinks maybe Zola "keeps adding clothing until it surpleases her," and also believes the tower of Casa Rosa is most "attractiful." For its kind ("I am not a boy or a girl. I am angel," the hero tells Zola), Angel has a great deal of humility. The novel's title comes from the otherworldly protagonist's sense that it doesn't quite know what it's doing: "Am I the only confused one? Maybe I am unfinished, an unfinished angel."
 
So much of Sharon Creech's (Walk Two Moons; Love that Dog) signature humor pervades the pages that readers may not initially notice the small moments the author creates that lead to several moving epiphanies. Angel "flishes" the citizens of Ticino by planting images in their sleeping heads, often to help them think more kindly of someone or to give them peace of mind. When Zola tells Angel about a group of homeless orphans who've taken refuge in an abandoned shed, Angel flishes the townsfolk and it backfires, leading to a comedy of errors and also to greater understanding. For Angel serves as the town's kindly brain trust. The hero knows that as Signora Mondopoco grows older, she also grows more childlike (oh how she loves poppets, "little dollies"), and that Signora Divino has not been the same since her grown boy moved to America and left his son in her care ("She seems hard on the outside, but inside is soft and fragile like an egg"). But who knew that a girl from America could teach a Swiss angel a thing or two? "Sometimes a people needs an angel and sometimes an angel needs a people," as Angel puts it. Creech uses her characters' struggle with language to demonstrate the importance of being understood, of making oneself seen and heard--orphans to villagers, Angel to Zola. This book will make you . . . "What is that word for the happy teeth?? Smule? Smale? Smile? Smile!"--Jennifer M. Brown