I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story.

It has been a year since the group known as the Horde rained fire and destruction upon Green’s village. Her family was destroyed, and life as anyone knew it was gone. She survived, in shock and despair, living alone in a world of solitude and darkness, cutting her hair and covering her body in tattoos of thorny roses and vines. There are few people left in the village, and Green hides in grief, trying to make sense of something that no one can understand. Her solace comes by starting a garden, nursing any wounded who manage to find her door, listening to their stories and keeping her special secret.

I’m just Green, who can make any garden grow. Green, who writes stories. Green, who has managed to go on alone.

She begins writing down their stories. When all the paper runs out, she makes her own from things she finds growing in nature. The paper is made to suit the stories and the people they are about. She writes about the baker who lost his only son in the firestorm and sprinkles his paper with cinnamon. She writes about her teacher whose books were burned and adds a stray page from one of her books while also adding some heather and heath. Now she is on a journey for more stories. She will gather them from the women who are considered the Enchanted --- the witches who survive, alone and misunderstood. Is writing down their stories a way of casting a spell? Perhaps Green is enchanted too.

I have decided to go looking for the Enchanted --- if they exist. I want more than just the stories that come to my kitchen, or the ones that follow me down the streets of my town. I want the different stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.

While her journey begins in search of these women, her special secret is her desire to find Diamond. He is the boy she discovered in her garden, mute and burned so badly he kept his face turned away. It is because of Diamond that she has the tattoo of half a red heart on her chest. He left her to find his family, and she has never heard from him again. Probably he is dead, or, if alive, he has long forgotten her. Somehow, she must still try.

It is only by chance that she runs across “the Finder,” “the king of the junkyard, of all that was ever lost.” Though just a boy himself, he has an amazing gift for putting things back together. It is because of him that the village begins to realize the possibilities of generators, lights and batteries. When Green meets him, she recognizes him as Troy James, the brother of her lost friend, Heather. He joins her and offers the possibility that Diamond, along with his sister Heather, might be prisoners in a place called the Tower. Green is definitely not finished with her own story as she encounters true heroism and the depth of real love:

I thought that what you lost you could never get back. I thought I knew the end of most stories. But I was wrong. 

Alice Hoffman’s second book about Green is perhaps even more extraordinary than her wonderful first, GREEN ANGEL. The writing has a sparse quality that fits the apocalyptic setting along with the delicate illuminations. Fans will continue to be entranced with Green’s painfully difficult and enlightening journey of discovery.

Green does push forward, looking at what she does not want to see, searching for something she is afraid to embrace, and finding what she needs most.

I am the last person anyone would have expected to believe in the future, but I do. I am not hurrying toward it anymore. I am inside of it.

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