Keys to Secret Worlds : Angels--and the Books They Bring--Unlock Children’s Imaginations

Perhaps they will be captivated by words, or pictures, or the feel of crisp pages against their fingers. A book can plant a seed, and life has taught Amanda Copeland that flowers give bloom even in childhood darkness.

Copeland recalls a library book she read as a youngster about a witch who found an egg. A strange creature emerged from the shattered shell, and the witch befriended it. Copeland read the “The Witch’s Egg” repeatedly.

The brilliantly colored illustrations--orange and purple and green--entranced her, the smell of the new book and the story of friendship diverted her thoughts from her life with an abusive, alcoholic mother. The book became her friend.

So that children can have books of their own, Copeland, 28, founded Book Angels last year while working as assistant manager at Green Apple Books in the Richmond District of San Francisco. Since moving to Los Angeles in January, she has initiated the program here and is hoping to provide books for the 640 students at Westminster Avenue School in Venice.

Paper angels representing Westminster students have been hung from the ceiling at the Midnight Special bookstore on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. For $12, customers can select an angel and a book discounted by the bookstore.

“For many of our students,” says Westminster Principal Betty Coleman, “books are not in the home, because they can’t afford them. This will be a start. They can have their own personal book they can take home and keep and treasure.”

A similar program is being offered chain-wide by Crown books in conjunction with the Friends of Foster Children. Along the West Coast, the chain is hoping to provide 9,450 foster children with books this holiday season.

The Book Angel program has brought Copeland full circle. After her mother’s death in 1976, she moved from Boise, Idaho, to Los Angeles to live with her father, a stranger. She attended Westminster for one semester.

It was spring. What began to blossom within Copeland was an understanding about race. It was her introduction to both the richness of diversity and the walls that separate people. As she embarked on her new life, she learned what it was to be rejected and made fun of because she was white. In this new world she felt out of place, like the strange creature she had read about.

What she didn’t realize at the time was that books open worlds and bring hope. “I never was read to and never was cultivated toward an educational life or a literary life at all,” she says. “It was almost a fluke that I went to college, and once I got there and met people who had different experiences growing up, I realized how depleted I was from that. This is partially a personal crusade for me, so kids don’t have that experience growing up.”

When Copeland implemented the Book Angel program here, Westminster seemed like a natural starting point. Students at the school, which is a magnet for science and math as well as a community school, test below average on standardized reading tests. When Coleman, the principal, started at Westminster three years ago, the community was caught up in a gang war. One father was killed walking children to school.

“I look at the book as a place of escape,” Copeland says, “a place of imagination and an appetizer. The students will be getting books that are purely fun, imaginative. I’m looking for them to fall in love with the idea of reading, imagining and learning how to think about things in a poetic and literary way.”

Copeland, a screenwriting graduate of the New York University film school, works in interactive media in the entertainment industry. She volunteers with the Actors’ Gang theater group, but her hopes are focused on creating a literacy center for young people.

“I have a dream of a big hangar-like building. Inside the hangar, in the lobby of the theater, we’re going to have a kids’ art gallery. It will be a place of expression of what’s going on in their minds and their hearts. Inside the theater will be a warm and insulated place where we have a lot of reading, a lot of one-on-one interaction, tutoring for kids, and we’ll put on some shows and read a lot of plays. I want it to be a place of solace.”

Her dream begins with Book Angels.