I admit I knew very little of the plight of the county of Luthuanians and their treatment at both the hands of Germany and Hitler, and Russia and Stalin. This was a very sad, and fascinating book. I read in quickly, and I highly recommend it. A bit of Alice Hoffman type of magic realism which was an interesting part of the story, but not as interesting as how families survived and continued to live after watching their parents and loved ones gassed in Hitler's crematories. Yet, the will to survive was strong.

This is a fascinating book! ( )

What an interesting story.
I picked this book up because it was said to have a magical realism element and was the fictional story of a girl born with wings.

I love magical realism, so that will usually get my attention.
This story was about Prudence, the character born with wings in the 1970's. The doctor removes them when Prudence is only 6 months old. She's never seen them, but because they were removed, she felt that they were like a birth defect.

Then Prudence's story gets a lot more interesting. She moves to another town and meets a little boy her age named Wheaton, he is able to see her wings.
When she turns 16, her grandparents that she has never met decide to come to meet her.

There's another side to this story, a large part of this story is about how Lithuanians were treated during the 1940's. Prudence's grandparents (and their families) went through horrible things. In a way, this has kept her grandparents and her dad from getting close. How can a hippie musician relate to his refugee parents? People that went through hardships he will never understand.

It is because of this that Prudence never knew that wings were not uncommon in her family. Generations of women on her father's side were born with wings.

I don't want to spoil any details of the story. I just wanted to mention the side of the story that focused on the war years because I wasn't really expecting that myself and think it's good to have a heads up.
This book dealt with some very sad issues but it also showed characters filled with strength and optimism.

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I read a digital ARC of this novel, received through Edelweiss. Many thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with the opportunity to review this book.

When the first thing you hear about a story is that the main character is a girl who was born with wings, and you’re not browsing in the fantasy genre, you’ll need to put on that Willing Suspension of Disbelief cap before you go any further. Luckily, I have no problem putting on that cap, especially for an author I’ve already read and loved. Once I accepted that first fantastical element and started reading the story of Prudence Eleanor Vilkas, I fell right in, trusting that Michele Young-Stone would take me along to wonderful places.

The novel opens with Prudence’s birth, and the commotion she caused in the delivery room when the doctor and nurses saw that she had wings. In a sense, though, Prudence’s story begins in Lithuania, generations before, when a young girl born with wings, named Aušrinė, loses her parents, and then her grandparents, as the Russian soldiers marched her people away from their homeland. When Prudence is 16, she meets “the Old Man” and his wife Ingeburg: Freddie’s parents. The Old Man tells Prudence about her Lithuanian heritage, including two other women who were born with wings: Aušrinė, the Old Man’s grandmother, and Daina, his youngest sister.

Young-Stone does take the reader to amazing and beautiful places in this novel, as well as dark and violent places: Lithuania in the mid-1800s, and again in World War II, and a handful of scenes in Nazi Germany. I loved the characters in this book. I marveled at the strength of those who survived under Stalin and Hitler. I appreciated the musicians among the Vilkas family, and the artists who enter the novel as supporting characters but become vital to the chain of events. There are bird-women, characters who have visions, and troubled souls who find one another, and with that connection, some measure of comfort and healing.

As you’ve probably guessed, the plot moves from one time period to another, from Prudence’s birth in 1973, to 1980 when she and her mother move to Florida, forward to a “present-day” of 2005, back into European history, and to 1989, when Prudence meets her grandparents and begins to learn where she and her wings came from. I was never confused about “when” I was at, once I’d read a few sentences into a new section. The novel also has several different first-person narrators, and some chapters told from a third-person perspective. Young-Stone handles the range of voices and the disparate elements of the story -- from historic to fantastic, and some everyday life in between -- with a sure hand, weaving a cloak as lovely and seamless as the night sky. I read the second half of the book in a wild burst, and my only complaint when I finished is that I wished it had been longer. I soothed my disappointment by reading it a second time. ( )