{Synopsis} – Meet a guardian angel like no other, from a writer like no other. Bold rising star, Victoria Schwab, makes her whimsical, inspiring, and clever middle-grade debut.
At a first glance, Aria seems like your average twelve-year-old girl. She has coppery hair, colored shoelaces, and a passion for cupcakes. But there's more to Aria than meets the eye. She can dream things into existence, use her own shadow like a door, and change the world in small, important ways. Aria is a guardian angel. She's been sent here to earn her wings. But to do that, she'll have to help three different girls.
{My thoughts} – Gabby is such a sweet twelve year old. She has so much potential and she doesn’t even see it. Her brother Marco got sick and it caused her whole world to be turned upside down. She isn’t handling all the change well, nor is she handling the fact that her brother is so ill well. Marco has cancer and he needs to have a surgery but can’t because he has been sick. When you have a sickness on top of cancer you can’t have surgery until your not as sick with whatever sickness because it can complicate things to an already weakened immune system.
Since Marco has been sick they have had to move and spend nearly every waking moment at the hospital. Gabby is forced to live in an apartment that doesn’t remind her of home, she has dreams of the day her brother got sick to where something was noticeable and the dreams haunt her. She also has the problem of being inviable when it comes to her mother. All Gabby’s mother does is think about Marco and barely pays attention to Gabby. Deep down inside Gabby wants her to pay attention to her but doesn’t know how to make that happen, so she accepts that she isn’t as important because her brother is so sick.
Gabby eventually meets another girl named Aria and they become quick friends. Aria helps Gabby realize her potential and helps to mend the relationship between Gabby and her mom. She also helps her to make new friends and find her own place in the new world she is now living in due to her brother being so sick. It takes away but eventually Aria tells Gabby that she is her Guardian Angel and once that is known Gabby doesn’t know how to react. She wants her brother to be better and thinks Aria should fix him but that isn’t the type of Angel Aria is.
Gabby soon finds her voice in choir and writes her feelings in a journal day to day. Her mother reads her journal one night with a push from Aria and that’s when everything between Gabby and her mom finally changes. Gabby had felt invisible for so long that she didn’t even know how to tell him mom how she felt but she wrote her feelings in a journal and the journal helped her to deal with all the bad and the sad and everything that was bothering her.
This book is truly amazing. It is about accepting your situation. It is about finding yourself once you are lost. It’s about the love and bond of family and friends. It’s about understanding that not everything will always be the way you want it to be in the end, but can be more then you expect if you push past the bad and rise up to the good waiting on the other side of the fence. Gabby was so lost for so long and Aria helped her to come back to find herself. Finding yourself can be one of the hardest things to do once you lose yourself, but with the right direction and guidance it can happen.
Anyone can benefit from reading this book. Anyone that feels invisible to a family member, lost in life, or is dealing with a sick family member that has caused their world to turn upside down.
{Quotes I like} –
01} I am twelve years old, and I don’t know who I am. I know who I was when I was eleven, before my brother got sick, but somewhere between then and now I’ve lost it. Myself, I mean. I don’t know how to find it again. I thought a self was something you always had, something that grew up with you. Something you couldn’t lose. I thought you only got one self, but if that’s the case, then what happens if you lose it? Do you try and find it, or replace it? I want to go back to being the person I was before, but it doesn’t work that way. Before – Gabby doesn’t exist anymore. And now? Now I don’t know who I am.
02} It wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t fair. Death wasn’t fair, and nothing Gabby could say right now would make it any easier to bear. Marco was upset, and he deserved to be upset. No one in this hospital was every upset enough. The all treated death like a sad routine instead of a tragedy.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
