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Johnson, Angela.
HEAVEN
New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1998.
IL YA
ISBN 0689822294
Click on the book to read Amazon reviews
                   She has her mom’s hands and her dad’s love for ice cream.  She loves her little brother and gets along with him pretty well.  Then one day, with the arrival of a mysterious letter from the Deep South, everything changes for Marley.
                    Suddenly, her hands are not her mother’s, her love of ice cream is just that ­ hers, and her brother is now her cousin.  And the often talked about, but rarely seen Uncle Jack, who has written letters to her about his travels for as long as Marley can remember ­ just where does he fit in to all of this?

                    Fourteen year old Marley, finds out one summer that the life and parents that she has always accepted as her own are not what they appear to be.  They say they should've told her earlier, but Marley reasons that that is what adults always say when they're caught in a big lie.  These are, after all, the people who taught her to walk and talk, who have held her hand when she was sick and taught her right from wrong ­ like honesty is the best policy, for instance.  Does the secret about her true parents make everything else wrong?
                    Marley spends the summer questioning why her parents lied to her and what it all means to her.  Her questions lead her to explore the various meanings of family through her own situation and those of her closest friends, Shoogy and Bobby.
                    What makes you a part of a family?  What makes you who you are?  Read Heaven and decide for yourself…  (Laura Blevins, mailto:laura_at_usc@yahoo.com, University of South Carolina, School of Library Science, graduate candidate)

SUBJECTS:     Adoption -- Fiction.
                        Parent and child -- Fiction.
                        African Americans -- Fiction.

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