Books with author Melissa Diaz

`My first visions of the universe are indelibly imprinted in my head...The sky was alive and vibrating, bringing out the explorer in me. I thought of all the answers out there waiting to meet my questions. Whenever the idea of a collective consciousness came my way, this is where I imagined it to live, among the stars. ` When Jean`s daughter Sugar Pea is born, everything is changed. For Sugar Pea becomes her life, her love, her whole sense of being, and when the doctors, her neighbours, her family, try to tell her that something is wrong, Jean refuses to believe them. Her comfort is to retreat into a world of her own, that includes her disabled daughter, the stars, and the patterns of life that surrounds them. For Jean, it is a question of dealing with the cards that she has been dealt, and making some order of them. But when her interior world begins to fall apart, it seems that life itself is in danger of collapsing.

This picture book should be viewed as a learning/teaching tool with a directive towards the reality of children living in foster care placement, and wishing for a family of their own. The text has been simplified to target a younger aged population, leaving room for discussion with a child and appropriate adult. The illustrations represent a variety of families/lifestyles, with attention to diversity. Potentially interactive association with text and "feeling hearts", incorporate feelings with pictorial cues and the written word, for reader interpretation, and developmental consideration. "Feeling hearts" reveal the emotional differences in the family types portrayed. Various levels of feelings are captured in this visual perception for the young reader, which heightens and expands the learning results. Sensitivity and respect underlie the plight of lost innocence, and the ending reveals a wished for and hopeful attainment of one child's "PERFECT MATCH", through adoption, and in her heart.