ANGELS WATCHING OVER ME

Experience 16-year-old Leah's roller-coaster ride into maturity with narrator Kate Forbes's careful, wide-eyed voice expressing each loop-de-loop. Adolescence is hard enough without having multiple stepfathers, a puzzling medical problem and hospital stay, and a mother in Japan, unwilling to interrupt her latest honeymoon to help. Then young Amish roommate Rebekah and her siblings, Charity and Ethan, stir up a warm breeze that promises sustaining friendship. And it does bring that, but also an emotional intimacy with Ethan, which is full of impossible contradictions. With Forbes's precise pacing and nuanced modulations, Leah and the people who offer her natural and supernatural help during her lonely pre-Christmas vigil make this spin through her teenage world both agonizing and miracle-filled. E.V. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/MAR 01]