With Above Us Only Sky, Michele Young-Stone (The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors) delivers a gorgeous sophomore effort rich with themes of family and rebirth.
In 1973, Prudence Vilkas is born with formations on her back that the doctor calls "bifurcated protrusions" but that her father, Freddie, more succinctly identifies as wings. Because of Freddie's estrangement from his parents, he doesn't know that Prudence's abnormality runs in the family. Despite her father's enchantment with his "little bird" of a daughter, her mother, Veronica, initially refuses to hold Prudence and agrees to have the wings surgically removed. After her parents' divorce, Prudence lives with her mother and rarely sees Freddie. Growing up, she takes solace in her friendship with Wheaton, a creative boy her age who can see the ghosts of her wings.
In 1989, Frederick Vilkas, most commonly called the Old Man, begins having dreams about his parents and sisters who were murdered in his native Lithuania during World War II. His yearning for family inspires him to contact his granddaughter, the child of his prodigal son, Freddie, for the first time.
Young-Stone disregards chronological time, instead alternating chapters set in World War II or Cold War Lithuania with chapters set during Prudence's 1970s girlhood or her 1980s adolescence, as well as snippets from a present day in which Prudence is an ornithologist and mourning the imminent death of the Old Man and several years' separation from Wheaton, who left her life without an explanation. Young-Stone's bittersweet and complex look at the ties that bind reminds us that "hope is the thing with feathers." --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads