The Unfinished Angel (Reviewed by Lauren)

The Unfinished Angel

By: Sharon Creech

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had their own angel to talk to?

The genre of this book is fantasy because it has a lot of made up events and imagination. This story is about a girl who is able to communicate with an angel. The main thing Zola and the angel do is give lost orphan children shelter and food. But the kids who were lost were very poor and they didn’t attend school. They didn’t know anything except their names. Zola’s dad had opened a school months before but no kids wanted to attend. When he finds out he has poor lost kids in his house a light bulb goes off in his head, and he provides them an education.

The strength is that the author (Sharon Creech) put in so much detail you could form a mental image in your head. For example when the angel talks about her home, she says, “The casa is pink, like so many other casas, but the stone tower that rises three more stories above it is the color of its stone—how you call it? Tan? The color of straw in winter? Or coffee with very much milk? However, a weakness is that the author makes the angel speak in broken English. For example, “Me, I am an angel. I am supposed to be having all the words in all the languages, but I am not.” This made the story difficult to read at times.

I give this book 4 ½ stars. I would recommend this book to 4th-5th graders. It would be just right for high level kids in 4th or 5th grade. This book might have been hard at points because I had to figure out what the angel was saying. But it’s a good and easy book because most kids can make mental images while reading the story. It’s like a movie going on in your head. I loved this book.