The Anatomy of Wings
Karen Foxlee, 2009
Random House Children's
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375856433
Summary
Ten-year-old Jennifer Day lives in a small mining town full of secrets. Trying to make sense of the sudden death of her teenage sister, Beth, she looks to the adult world around her for answers.
As she recounts the final months of Beth’s life, Jennifer sifts through the lies and the truth, but what she finds are mysteries, miracles, and more questions. Was Beth’s death an accident? Why couldn’t Jennifer—or anyone else—save her?
Through Jennifer’s eyes, we see one girl’s failure to cross the threshold into adulthood as her family slowly falls apart (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Karen Foxlee lives in Gympie, Australia. The Anatomy of Wings is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Set in the author's native Australia in the early 1980s, this sensitive debut novel weaves and bobs between two time frames as the narrator, Jennifer, tries to understand the death of her older sister, 14-year-old Beth, who fell from a water tower. In the prevailing view, Beth was wild: she had sex with strangers and fell asleep, drunk, in neighbors' yards. But the girls' grandmother believes that Beth once saw an angel and had a bit of grace in her ever since, and that her acts were her attempts to save people. Jennifer sees evidence of both, remembering that "the more [Beth] glowed, the wilder she got." Trying to understand Beth's decline and to cope with her own grief, which has deprived her of her singing voice, Jennifer searches for clues in a box of Beth's belongings. Tangents may confuse; at times, the litany of small details and anecdotes burden the plot. But the metaphors embedded in the story and the luscious prose (a teacher's eyes are "a flat gray-green and impenetrable as a crocodile's") will hold readers until the moving conclusion. Ages 14-up.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Not all the plot’s tangents are well integrated, but the story works as memory does, with skips, gaps, and sudden, piercing moments that are as illogical and illuminating as a dream. With heart-stopping accuracy and sly symbolism, Foxlee captures the small ways that humans reveal themselves, the mysterious intensity of female adolescence, and the surreal quiet of a grieving house, which slowly and with astonishing resilience fills again with sound and music. —Gillian Engberg
Booklist
Foxlee's debut novel (published in Australia in 2007) seeks answers to a sister's meaningless downfall and death on the cusp of adulthood. Narrated by an adult Jenny channeling her ten-year-old self, the novel arcs from her older sister's funeral back through the preceding year in their small Australian mining town and ends with the eventual, hope-filled beginnings of healing. Jenny's exploration is partially about Beth's life (sexual awakening, drinking, cigarettes) and partially her own search for her singing voice which has disappeared, clearly in response to the fracturing of her family. Whether Beth truly saw angels or thought sex would mend broken men remains unclear; Jenny's perspective means she fills in the blanks of her sister's life, as anyone must after a loss. Elegant, evocative writing set this apart from the rash of recent and forthcoming dead-sibling stories, but the young narrator, unfamiliar Australian terms and seemingly unnecessary recent-past setting (1983) will make this a hard sell to nearly any teen reader—although adult readers will rejoice in its elegiac beauty.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Anatomy of Wings:
1. Discuss Jennifer and her sense of loss. What kind of child is she? Why are facts so important to Jennifer, and what does that suggest about how her mind works?
2. What is the significance of Jennifer's singing voice? Talk about how it "got stuck"—and how she ultimately regains it.
3. How does Jennifer's family react to Beth's death. How would Jennifer prefer they deal with it—and why?
4. Discuss the differing views of Beth—that she was wild and loose, or that she operated through grace and saw angels. Which way does Jennifer lean...and which way do you? Why?
5. What is the trajectory of Beth's behavior shortly before she dies? How does it change and why? Who, if anyone, is to blame? How do Beth's parents respond to her changes in behavior?
6. Not only in its title, but throughout, the book has many references to wings—birds wings, Icarus's wings.... What is their symbolic significance to the story?
7. Talk about the box of Beth's belongings and what its contents suggest to Jennifer about her sister.
8. Did you enjoy the structure of the novel, the breaks in straightforward narrative? In what way might it mimic how memory works?
9. What does the novel gain by being told as a first-person narrative?
10. In addition to coping with loss, what are other basic human issues explored in Anatomy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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