On Borrowed Wings
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Adele Pietra has heard her mother say that her destiny is carved in the same brilliantly hued granite her father and brother cleave from the Stony Creek mine: she is to marry a quarryman. But when Adele's brother, Charles, dies in a mining accident, Adele sees the chance to change her life. Enrolling at Yale as Charles, Adele assumes his identity -- and gender -- as a way to leave behind her mother's expectations and the limitations of her provincial Connecticut town.
To her own surprise, hair chopped and chest bound, Adele falls in naturally with a lively crew of undergraduates: the Jewish Harry Persky with his slick Manhattan know-how, the quiet and mysterious legacy student Phineas, and the lanky, charismatic Wick. And in many ways, Adele faces her freshman year at Yale as would any undergraduate boy: she dreads invasive PE examinations and looks forward to dances, experiments with cigarettes and reads the classics. Through her work with a questionable eugenics professor and her friendship with a local Italian family, Adele confronts her class and ethnicity as never before, all the while fearing that both her crush on Wick and her mother's well-meaning interventions will put an end to her delicate masquerade.
One part social history, one part comingof-age tale, On Borrowed Wings is an impeccably researched first novel that transports us to 1930s Yale, showing us around through the eyes of an unlikely, appealing female narrator.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Prasad's touching first novel, Adele Pietra, a poor girl from a Connecticut granite quarry town in the 1930s, becomes a pioneer at Yale disguised as her brother. Adele grows up in a town where the working-class residents never mix with the upper-crust vacationers. Except, that is, for Adele's parents; her mother was cut off by her wealthy family after she married a dashing Italian stonecutter. After a quarry accident kills Adele's father and her brother, Charles, Adele impersonates Charles and attends Yale in his place. At Yale, she makes friends with a stereotypically bookish, money-minded boy from Manhattan and handsome WASP Wick, who presents the greatest temptation to shed her assumed masculinity. The polarity of her upbringing adds meaning to an unexpected twist: Adele's work-study job is to assist a bigoted professor conducting a crooked study aimed at proving the rabble is intellectually inferior to the upper classes. Prasad has obviously done a great deal of research for this novel, and while some of it is integrated clumsily, she captures the excitement and strangeness of beginning college. Transcending the sometimes labored period setting and wisely taking for granted the strictures of society that make Adele's charade necessary Prasad renders believable a girl who becomes herself in a most unlikely way.
