Chico
High School graduate Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of the highly acclaimed “The
Language of Flowers,” returns with the story of Leticia Espinosa (Letty), a
thirty-three-year-old mother of two, by different fathers, struggling to make
sense of life in a poor section of the Bay Area.
“We
Never Asked For Wings” ($27 in hardcover from Ballantine Books; also for Amazon
Kindle) is about transformative change. “Letty had been a teenage mother,
despondent and suffering from a heartbreak she’d tried hard to drink away.” Now
Alex was fifteen, Luna six. For all of their lives they had been cared for by
Letty’s parents, Maria Elena and Enrique.
Though
Letty had been born in the US, her parents were undocumented. “They had stayed
for the birds,” Alex realized. “Unless it was to return to Mexico, his grandfather
had refused to leave his perch beneath the Pacific Flyway. …”
Letty
“knew nothing about children. … So she went out and got a job, and then
another, and then a third, while Maria Elena stayed home. … When she wasn’t
working, she’d been asleep or hungover. … For fifteen years that had been their
arrangement, and it would be their arrangement still, if Enrique hadn’t gone
home to see his dying mother and not come back.” Enrique is a master artist
using bird feathers, and now they belonged to Alex.
When
Maria Elena leaves to join her husband in Mexico, Letty must learn how to care
for her children. Something begins to grow inside her, “a glimmer of curiosity,
a desire for knowledge she hadn’t felt since high school.” She meets Rick at
her bartending job, and when Alex’s dad, Wes (now a doctor at Stanford) returns
to their lives, Letty must make a crucial choice.
Young
love begins to grow between Alex and neighbor Yesenia. Alex is smart, and
Letty, through a bit of deception, manages to enroll him in a top tier high
school, where his brilliant science fair experiment (about bird feathers and climate
change) threatens to bring their world crashing down.
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