We Never Asked for Wings
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
1 ratings • 1 reviews
We Never Asked for Wings
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
1 ratings • 1 reviews
From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Language of Flowers comes her much-anticipated new novel about young love, hard choices, and hope against all odds. For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children—Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six—in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty’s parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she’s worked for and her family’s fragile hopes for the future. Vanessa Diffenbaugh blends gorgeous prose with compelling themes of motherhood, undocumented immigration, and the American Dream in a powerful and prescient story about family.
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Read a lot of this book in one sitting. Was really drawn into the characters and wanted to root for Letty as she figures out how to be a mother.
I enjoyed the book, not as much as the Language of Flowers, but I still had a good reading experience and I'm looking forward to discussing this book in book club.
I wonder if I will get more out of these books on motherhood after I've had a child.
Couple of small things that I'll put down here, but may add more of a review after the book club meeting:
- I liked everything about how this book started: I thought it was an interesting choice for the Grandma to sort of "choose" her husband over the kids. Was she doing it to help give Letty the push she needed? Was that a "selfish" choice? Interesting. I also enjoyed reading about Alex's struggle to temporarily parent Luna, even though I really liked Alex and I shouldn't have enjoyed this part, I thought it was well written and an easy way to endear Alex to us/the reader.
- Luna was obnoxious pretty much all the way through, and I think she was used more as a plot device than anything else
- Letty was really struggling and I was sympathetic to her pretty much throughout the novel
- I didn't really see why Alex loved Yesenia so much, nor she him. Also didn't see why Rick was into Letty either
- I wanted the feathers to actually be more integral to the story. Perhaps there is symbolism or some literary device that I've not realized yet?
- I didn't understand why Letty didn't speak Spanish or understand it better
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