Enormous Wings
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From the beloved New York Times bestselling author Laurie Frankel, an exuberant and timely new novel
At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. She fears it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: She’s pregnant.
As word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, belly-rubbers and rubber-neckers all descending on Vista View while Pepper struggles to determine her next move. Soon she has some hard decisions to make—and some she’s not allowed to make.
Enormous Wings is an urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about what happens when you don’t get to choose anymore. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks—even so late in the day—can still change, and then change everything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 77-year-old Texan grapples with the astonishing news that she's pregnant in the amusing latest from Frankel (Family Family). Pepper Mills, a straight-talking Brooklyn native, blames her silly name on her ex-husband, Roger, whose surname she took when they married. After getting into a fender bender, she loses her driver's license and reluctantly moves into the same continuing care community where Roger lives. She starts up a new relationship with a charming British man named Moth and describes their new home as "like moving back into your college dorm, if your college dorm had been a Hampton Inn." Feeling queasy and lightheaded, she sees a doctor, wondering if she might have dementia, only to learn that she's pregnant. After the initial shock, the doctor assures her the pregnancy will probably terminate naturally. While she wonders if her body can handle giving birth or an abortion, which is illegal in Texas, word gets out about a pregnant septuagenarian, stirring the public into a frenzy over what she should do. Frankel blends humor and gravitas in her portrait of an expectant mother who's also facing her own mortality. Fans of the author's quirky family stories about hot-button issues will find much to enjoy.
