Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old Gemma doesn’t know where to turn. She is being adopted by relatives she didn’t know she had. The foster family she has loved all her life is breaking up. The farm where they’ve lived is being sold. Gemma needs to fix things fast--if she can only figure out how. Now she has found the solution: she’ll get herself an angel. Her increasingly desperate efforts to earn one, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, lead her to a confrontation with her painfully mysterious past, and ultimately to an understanding with her new family that holds out hope for them all. This engrossing novel offers a fresh and winning portrait of a quirky heroine with a unique voice, a passionate heart, a mission to accomplish, and the kind of offbeat logic that can cause even the most careful plans to go awry.