We Never Asked for Wings

We Never Asked for Wings
The Gone Dead

"...A lifetime of mistakes had taught her what everyone around
her already believed: that she couldn't do it; that alone, she wasn't
enough, and so she'd a long ago surrendered her life to the one person
capable of holding it all together.
She needed her mother."
Letty, one of the protagonists of Vanessa Diffenbaugh's We Never
Asked for Wings, is in quite a bind. Her parents had lived with her
in California. Weeks before her father has returned to Mexico to care
for his dying mother. Now she thinks she's driving her mother to pick
him up and bring him back to the states.
But when they all get together Letty's parents have a scary
revelation to share with her. They're staying in Mexico. She's to
return alone to the strangers who are her children: Alex (15) and
Luna (6)--the kids she's left home alone, hoping they wouldn't have an
accident or be picked up by children's protective services.
"Yesenia was not a U.S. Citizen. All her life she'd been here
illegally, and she hadn't even known it. Alex didn't know what to
say..."
Alex is deeply in love with Yesenia. When Letty manages to move
her family to a better neighborhood, qualifying Alex for a better high
school, Yesenia is left alone in a dangerous one. She starts getting
beat up by bullies. Alex becomes desperate to make it possible for
her to join him, not fully realizing how precarious her undocumented
status makes her.
"Wes stood on the other side.
All at once, there was no air. She reached for the doorframe
and steadied herself against it, trying to look casual while praying
her legs wouldn't buckle."
When Wes left home for college he had no clue that he had left
Letty pregnant. She hadn't wanted to stand in the way of his dreams
and leave him resenting her and their unborn child. None of his
successes can prepare him for the discovery that he has a teenage son.
This engaging narrative seamlessly interweaves family conflict
and complexity with pressing social justice concerns.

"She had forgotten about this house, figured it had been knocked
down forever ago. But apparantly it had been waiting for her: passing
from her father to her mother, then to her mother's mother, and now
that Gran has passed, to her. It's all that she owns until she's done
making payments on the car."
When Billie, protagonist of Chanelle Benz's The Gone Dead,
arrives to assess the shack she's inherited in Mississippi--see if
there's anything she can do with it--she's returning to a place she's
been away from for thirty years. As a child she'd been visiting her
father, Cliff, a talented Black poet. The visit ended in tragedy.
Her father was found dead in a field. His death was ruled an
accident, the result of a fall.
But what if it wasn't an accident? As Billie becomes acquainted
with Cliff's neighbors--his younger brothers, a man who went to school
with him back in the day, two generations of a white family who had
once owned her ancestors--she begins to learn things that don't add
up, to discern clues that point to an alternate reality. What if her
father had been sticking his nose where some people felt it didn't
belong, uncovering information they were determined would never see
the light of day? What if law enforcement was involved in a cover up
and possibly a crime?
What if the people who may have silenced her father think she's
getting too close to the truth?
The Gone Dead, told through the alternating voices of its main
characters, combines a riveting narrative with a portrayal of racist
violence in the South in the not so distant past.

On a purrrsonal note, well it's back to school. I'd consider this
spring break a ten on a one to eleven scale--in other words, awesome.
I had my very successful Goodwill run Friday. Eugene took me to
Dennys for breakfast Saturday. They do breakfast right! Today Tobago
and I attended zoom church and it was nice enough for me to hang
laundry and read outside. (Jules)
The snow mountains are shrinking. (Tobago)
A great big shout out goes out to all my fellow Black Bears returning
to the school for the last part of spring semester.
Oh, yeah, another bit of big news that I'll announce here after I
reveal it in person on campus.
Tobago and Jules Hathaway






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