California Angel »

Who she really is and what she really does are bewildering questions even for Toy Johnson. She only knows that a near death experience has launched her on a journey into the unknown-a journey she is destined to repeat again and again with astonishing results. When she returns to her familiar work world as a teacher in Southern California and her seemingly ideal marriage to a brilliant surgeon, she is haunted by dreamlike memories of children on the brink of death-children she believes she has somehow saved.

Her husband, Stephen, thinks she is hallucinating. Her best friend, Sylvia, thinks she is suffering from the frustrations of a childless marriage. The staff of a high-tech Manhattan hospital thinks this is how she deals with her mysterious and frightening malady. Yet despite what anyone thinks, when Toy sees herself on television rescuing a boy from a deadly fire, she knows she is a purveyor of miracles-a living angel. But this newfound vision of herself is challenged when she is arrested for kidnapping and charged with murder.

Toy's incredible journey into the realms of magic and divine intervention climaxes in a breathtaking courtroom trial where the laws of man come in riveting conflict with far higher laws, and ordinary reason comes face to face with extraordinary revelation. While Nancy Taylor Rosenberg offers here the same gripping level of drama and suspense for which she is famous, she also opens the door to a wondrous world where the spirit can triumphantly transcend the flesh. In Toy Johnson, she has crated a heroine who will do more than make you believe in angels-she will make you believe in human beings.

Publishers Weekly

In a surprising departure from her bestselling legal thrillers (Mitigating Circumstances, etc.), Rosenberg tells a warmhearted story of divine intervention and angelic miracles. Protagonist Toy Johnson is a charismatic teacher who insists on thinking positively about the futures of the underprivileged children in her inner-city school in Santa Ana, Calif. Though Toy is beautiful (she has ``flaming red hair''; her skin is ``as translucent as the finest silk'') and wealthy, she is unhappy: she has been unable to conceive, and her surgeon husband does not sympathize with her need to donate money to the needy families of her young charges. Idealistic Toy craves ``magic, miracles, overnight solutions.'' She has had this sense of mission since the day she suffered cardiac arrest, when she had a vision in which she helped an autistic boy. Now, having decided that she needs some space to consider a separation from her husband, Toy goes to New York, where she suffers recurrences of cardiac arrest, each time having vivid dreams of saving children from grave danger. Yet these children turn out to be real, and mounting evidence indicates that her lifesaving actions may occur during out-of-body astral projections. Soon Toy understands that she is an angel, deputized on missions of mercy. Rosenberg's fervid, exalted prose often soars to melodramatic heights, and her basic premise requires the same kind of belief that draws readers to The Celestine Prophecy. She eschews heavy-handed sermonizing, however, and intriguing plot twists keep the narrative moving briskly. Literary Guild main selection; audio rights to Penguin Highbridge; author tour. (Jan.)