Friday, June 12, 2015

We Never Asked for Wings

We Never Asked for WingsFrom 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 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.

I wanted to love this book, I mean I really did want to love it.  Especially after reading the author's acknowledgments about being so invested in the book and concerned about reception for her second novel.  But unfortunately, I didn't love it like I hoped I would.  I enjoyed reading it, but somewhere along the way it just fell flat for me.  There were just too many things, too many stories, too many circumstances that seemed resolved too easily or just plain overlooked that I felt really could have made the story more whole had they been handled differently.  I will still read her books in the future, but it just didn't quite captivate me like The Language of Flowers did. 


* I received this book from the author/publisher in exchange for an honest review *

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