All of Us with Wings
Stories about Love
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
This young adult fantasy debut about love, found family, and healing is “a fantastical ode to the Golden City’s postpunk era,” told through the eyes of a Mexican-American girl (Entertainment Weekly).
“Complex and beautiful, blending folklore, San Franciscan history, the music scene, vampires, magic . . . hard to put down.” —School Library Journal
Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rockstar family in one of the city’s storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas’s live-in governess and quickly finds her place in the girl’s tight-knit household, which operates on a free-love philosophy and easy warmth despite the band’s growing fame.
But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas perform a riot-grrrl ritual in good fun, accidentally summoning a pair of ancient beings bound to avenge the wrongs of Xochi’s past. She would do anything to preserve her new life, but with the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those who’ve hurt her, no one is safe—not the family Xochi’s chosen, nor the one she left behind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lyrical contemporary fantasy set in postpunk-era San Francisco, a young woman comes of age while serving as a live-in governess to a 12-year-old whose family is in a popular rock band. Biracial Mexican-American Xochi Madrid, 17, hitchhiked to San Francisco to escape past trauma and the man who sexually abused her. Now caught up in the lifestyle of a freewheeling, polyamorous household, Xochi grapples with her lack of direction, her reluctant attraction to 28-year-old band member Leviticus, and her responsibilities to his daughter, and her charge, brilliant Pallas, who's rebelling in her own way. Amid this, a playful spell gone wrong accidentally summons two supernatural children who seek vengeance on anyone who has harmed Xochi. Keil's atmospheric debut conjures up a setting both seductive and dangerous for her diverse cast of flawed characters. Following a number of supporting characters including Peasblossom, a knowledgeable bookstore cat Keil plays with prose and imagery, interweaving the dreamlike language of Francesca Lia Block with a Latin-American sensibility. The frank inclusion of sexual exploration and drug use adds an extra level of maturity to this thoughtful story about trauma and vengeance, adult decision making, and recovery. Ages 16 up.
