Green Angel

Like many of prolific American author Alice Hoffman’s novels, Green Angel features a combination of realism and fantastical elements that combine into a timeless feeling. Published in 2003 as the first of a trilogy of novels, this young adult fairytale is the story of an adolescent girl’s descent into and gradual recovery from the unimaginable grief of losing her family. Set in a vaguely magical, post-apocalyptic world, this novel fuses together the popular genre of dystopian young adult fiction with lyrical descriptions and the non-logic of dreams.

Our protagonist is fifteen-year-old Green, whose family farms on the outskirts of a large city. Quiet and shy, Green has supernatural gardening skills that combined with her infinite patience, make her the perfect person to tend the family’s crop-yielding garden.

One day in the fall, Green’s mother, father, and younger sister, Aurora, go to sell what they’ve harvested in the city market. Because Green is left behind against her will to tend the garden, she refuses to say goodbye to her family. Soon, she watches in horror as a devastating and all-encompassing fire consumes the part of the city where the market used to be. The novel brings in shades of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center, as witnesses watch people jump out of buildings to their deaths in order to escape the fire. As she watches the far-away flames, embers get in her eyes, rendering her half-blind.



The immediate fallout of the conflagration turns the city and its surroundings into a wasteland of chaos. Because so many adults died, the ruins of the city are flooded with orphaned children and teenagers. After waiting for several days, Green realizes that her family will never come back. Guilt-ridden over her behavior earlier and overwhelmed by her grief, Green decides to punish her mind, body, and even her garden.

She renames herself Ash, sews thorns onto her father’s leather jacket and nail-studded boots in order to craft herself a kind of armor, and covers her body in tattoos of twining vines, bats, ravens, and roses. One of the tattoos is a half of a heart, drawn directly over her actual heart. As Ash, she steels herself against all emotion, putting on a hardened and jaded affect in order to dull her pain and also to protect herself from the opportunistic looters that comb the countryside. Even though she could use her gardening powers to help her plants overcome being suffocated by ash and grow again, she refuses.

But Ash can’t entirely erase Green. For one thing, she has frequent dreams about her sister, Aurora, the lighthearted, charming, beautiful opposite to Green’s introverted nature. In her dreams, Aurora is sometimes older than she was when she died because Ash has a hard time accepting that her sister will never get to grow up – but this older version of Aurora doesn’t recognize Green when she is in her Ash guise.



Ash develops a relationship with a boy her age who almost never speaks and who keeps his face covered. Naming him Diamond, Ash finds it easy to communicate with him even without language. Diamond slowly starts to clean the ashes from the garden and paints a portrait of Ash. Eventually, he decides to go off in search of his mother who may still be alive even though she was in the city during the fire. Ash and Diamond kiss, and she realizes that he has a half-heart tattoo – the other half of hers.

Part of Ash’s healing involves taking care of those less powerful than she is. She takes in a stray dog and a wounded hawk, both of which end up protecting her and being fiercely loyal. Ash also finds herself leaving out food for Heather Jones, a former classmate who was the much envied most popular girl in school, but who has since fallen in with a group of teens who drink and carouse to forget what happened. Despite Ash’s efforts, Heather eventually disappears. It is clear to the others that Heather has let herself drift into the fire, leaving behind nothing but memories and pain.

As the year continues and Ash slowly grows and heals, she reconnects with the old woman who was her family’s neighbor. Before the conflagration, Green and Aurora used to steal the old woman’s golden apples, so Ash assumes that the neighbor woman is angry with her – but this isn’t at all the case. Instead, the old woman is happy to have Ash visit her house, but each time the girl comes over, the neighbor asks her what her name is. The answer is always the same: “Ash.”



Finally, in the spring, on Ash’s sixteenth birthday, the old woman tells her to take a closer look at the black tattoos on her body. To her surprise, the tattoos are starting to turn colorful, with the vines becoming green and the flowers red. The half-heart tattoo near her heart glows red at its center. She is no longer Ash but is once again Green, who can again tend her garden and look forward to the fruits of summer. Instead of covering herself in an impenetrable wall of armor, she can share the tragic story of her family.

The novel received a positive response from critics, who cite Hoffman’s lyrical prose and the message of living through grief until time softens its pain. Publishers Weekly praised Green Angel as “Achingly lovely… In lean, hypnotic prose, Hoffman constructs a post-apocalyptic fairy tale leavened with hope,” while the School Library Journal called it “Beautifully written.”