Sweet, Hereafter (Heaven Trilogy Series #3)

by Angela Johnson

Overview

After Heaven and The First Part Last, three-time Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Angela Johnson concludes her acclaimed trilogy with a poignant tale of finding where you belong and who you belong with.

Shoogy left home with all her jeans still in the washer because she couldn’t think of a reason to stay. She’s not sure where she belongs, until she meets Curtis. Curtis knows for certain where he does not want to be and that’s to be back in the army. He is happy to be in Ohio, where it is quiet and he can spend time with Shoogy. But when Curtis gets orders to return to Iraq, will belonging with each other be enough to keep Shoogy and Curtis together? Angela Johnson takes us back to Heaven, Ohio in this bittersweet tale of first love found and lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780689873867
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	01/04/2011
Series:	Angela Johnson's Heaven Trilogy Series , #3
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	887,037
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	750L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Angela Johnson has won three Coretta Scott King Awards, one each for her novels The First Part Last, Heaven, and Toning the Sweep. The First Part Last was also the recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award. She is also the author of the novels Looking for Red and A Certain October. Her books for younger readers include the Coretta Scott King Honor Book When I Am Old with You, illustrated by David Soman; Wind Flyers and I Dream of Trains, both illustrated by Loren Long; and Lottie Paris Lives Here and its sequel Lottie Paris and the Best Place, both illustrated by Scott M. Fischer. Additional picture books include A Sweet Smell of Roses, Just Like Josh Gibson, The Day Ray Got Away, and All Different Now. In recognition of her outstanding talent, Angela was named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Kent, Ohio. Visit her at AJohnsonAuthor.com.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

THERE’S A FRONT PAGE PHOTO OF MY friend Jos standing by the side of a road on a hot summer day. I almost don’t recognize him, because he’s out of place. It’s a frozen moment in time—but I’m so used to Jos being animated, funny and moving. It bothers me that one picture can define everything in other people’s minds but never really tell the whole story.

A cop in dark shades is touching him on the arm. Gently. The photographer was close, ’cause you can see every line on the cop’s and Jos’s face. There weren’t any lines an hour before.

• • •

It’s early. Everything is quiet. Too quiet. I turn on the radio to make sure there hasn’t been some kind of world-ending disaster. Hell—they do happen. More than you could ever dream they do. I’ve seen them, been a part of them, don’t even have to watch the news to see one happening.

My feet are cool on the old hardwood floors, and I don’t even mind that I’m still trying to work out a splinter. I walk to the front window.

I love the cool.

And I love the feeling I get knowing I’m walking on floors people walked on a hundred years ago. I blow the candle out ’cause finally the sun is struggling past the clouds.

The radio crackles as I stare out at Lake Erie haze.

I press my face against the window and feel cobwebs on the side of my head but don’t pull back. If I listen close I can hear cars blowing past on the road about a hundred yards away.

I listen for Curtis over the drone of the radio—I do it without thinking. Then I see the groundhogs through the window and start peeling apples for them.

I do it like I breathe or walk to the sink to get a glass of water.

Automatic.

It starts to rain, and I watch like the photographer did on that burning hot summer day, while rain streaks every inch of the window.

© 2010 Angela Johnson

Editorial Reviews

This thoughtful tale, with its quietly poetic sensibility and timely themes, will resonate with those who are grieving the loss of loved ones because of the war. — BULLETIN, March 1, 2010

From the Publisher

Sweet never really fit in at home or at school, but she has satisfying friends and connections. Few are surprised when she leaves-or is kicked out of-her family home, but there is talk in her small town when she moves into a cabin in the woods with a young man. Curtis, somewhat mysterious, is a military reservist and college student, home from Iraq and-perhaps-AWOL. "I've had secret parts of me since I was little. I'm used to it, and I guess it makes sense I'd love the secret parts of another," she says. Sweet doesn't question Curtis's enveloping sadness, and there is an air of inevitability about the way he avoids returning to war. Johnson's evocative yet starkly simple language powerfully shows the devastating effects of the war on one small community. Whether in a scene at a high-school career fair with military recruiters or in the conversations between Sweet and teens readers met in the book's award-winning companions, Heaven (1998) and The First Part Last (2003), the characters and circumstances are never anything less than rich and real. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews