Wings to Soar
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A historically relevant middle-grade novel-in-verse about a girl's resiliency when faced with hatred towards refugees. Readers of The Night Diary and Inside Out and Back Again shouldn’t miss out.
It's 1972 and Viva’s Indian family has been expelled from Uganda and sent to a resettlement camp in England, but not all of them made the trip. Her father is supposed to meet them in London, but he never shows up. As they wait for him, Viva, her mother, and her sister get settled in camp and try to make the best of their life there.
Just when she is beginning to feel at home with new friends, Viva and her family move out of the camp and to a part of London where they are not welcome. While grappling with the hate for brown-skinned people in their new community, Viva is determined to find her missing father so they can finish their move to Canada. When it turns out he has been sponsored to move to the United States, they have to save enough money to join him.
Told in verse, Wings to Soar follows a resilient girl and the friendships she forges during a turbulent time.
"These rich, vivacious lines combine an insistence on self with undaunted hope. A supreme heart-changer."
—Rita Williams-Garcia, Newbery Honor, National Book Award, Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and Coretta Scott King Award Winner
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1972, after the president of Uganda exiles people of Indian descent, 10-year-old Viva, her sister, and their mother take refuge at Royal Air Force Greenham camp in England. There, Viva yearns for her father, who remains in Kampala, Uganda. As she acclimates to her new surroundings, Viva embraces the meaning behind her name ("It means/ alive,/ spirited,/ living life"), seeks solace in her love of words and Diana Ross, and befriends two British siblings and an airman. Through Viva's first-person narration, rendered in engaging verse, Athaide (Orange for the Sunsets) deftly portrays how the protagonist copes with the torpor and anxiety of life in the camp. When the family leaves the base for London with a sponsor, the author steadily seeds intensity, tension, and fear throughout via Viva's feelings of alienation and her encounters with racism and xenophobia. Intermittent b&w photographs provide historical context, while Viva's affinity for language adds humor and further learning opportunities throughout, as when she defines collywobbles ("stomach pain or queasiness") mid-stanza. The quirky cast, combined with this underexplored time period informed by the author's family history, are engaging, and the narrator herself proves especially memorable. Ages 10–up.
