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Informationen zum Autor Tracey Baptiste was born in Trinidad and moved to Brooklyn, New York, when she was fifteen. Ms. Baptiste is a former elementary school teacher. She lives with her husband and daughter in Englewood, New Jersey, where she is at work on another novel. Klappentext Grace has always had wild red hair like no one else in her family and a birthmark on her shoulder that her mother told her was the mark of an angel. When Grace is sent from New York to spend the summer with her grandmother in Trinidad, she looks through the family album and discovers a blurred photograph of a stranger with a birthmark -- her birthmark -- and Grace is full of questions. No one is able to identify the man in the photo, and Grace is left with no choice but to find out who he is and what he might mean to her. What Grace does not know is that her search will lead to a discovery about herself and her family that she never could have imagined.Tracey Baptiste's first novel is a tender coming-of-age story set on the island of Trinidad. Angel's Grace explores the meaning of identity and truth, and the unbreakable ties of a family bound by love. Leseprobe Chapter One My mother told me that when I was born, no one, not even the doctor, thought I was going to live. I arrived too early, and I was so tiny, the doctors had to keep me in an incubator so that I could breathe. And every day, my mother sat by me and fed me and prayed for me and cried because she didn't know what else to do. One day she fell asleep in the chair next to my incubator, and she dreamed that an angel came to watch over me. He was beautiful, my mother said, and he smiled at the both of us and told her that everything was going to be just fine. He put his hand over my heart and promised her that I would be fine. When my mother was finally able to take me home and she bathed me for the first time, she noticed a mark like a small pale hand above my heart. She remembered the angel, and knew that it wasn't a dream after all. He had touched me, and that was how I had gotten better. My mother told me that this was better than a birthmark, that it was an angel mark, and that I should be happy knowing that the good Lord had sent a guardian angel to watch over me. At times when I felt sad or lonely, I asked my mother to come to my room and tell me the story all over again. I would put my hand over the angel mark, and she would put her hand on mine, and the three of us would smile at our story -- Mom, the angel, and me. I stopped believing in that story four years ago, when I was nine. I guess I just grew up all of a sudden. The story about my birthmark began to seem silly. But maybe if I still believed in my angel, I could put my hand over my birthmark, and I would feel better about this awful summer. What could be worse than being held prisoner on the island where my parents grew up, with my sister and my grandmother? I just knew that Maciré and my other friends were having a great time back home in Brooklyn. I was missing everything. At first my best friend, Maciré, was jealous when I told her that I'd be spending my summer on a Caribbean island. I pulled the letter I had written earlier out of my pocket. Dear Maci, Let me tell you a little something about Trinidad. It's a great place to visit -- blue sky, sandy beaches, and delicious exotic fruits so sweet and ripe they fall right off the trees. But every day it's the same blue sky, and after the hundredth wave sends you crashing down into the gritty sand, and you've swallowed a gallon of salt water, and the damp and the mosquitoes get to you, and there's sticky juice in your hair from the fruit falling on your head, you get a little bit tired of living on an island. Two weeks down, six more before I get back home. Your favorite redhead, Gracie "Grace, you get them zaboca yet?" Ma called down. Ma was my mother's mom...
