Paper wings

by Marly A. Swick

The year is 1963 and President John F. Kennedy is busy changing the world. Or so believes Suzanne Keller, the twelve-year-old narrator of Paper Wings. It is a belief inspired by Suzanne's mother, Helen, whose devotion to this dynamic political leader is imbued with a nearly religious fervor. Before the world's transformation can be completed, however, President Kennedy is tragically assassinated. As Suzanne notes in Paper Wings' opening sentence, "Lee Harvey Oswald might as well have shot my mother through the heart.". So begins Marly Swick's extraordinary first novel, Paper Wings, a brilliant meditation on the choices - both simple and complex - that direct and shape our lives. Through the adoring, often bewildered eyes of Suzanne, whose love for her sensitive, highly strung, mysterious mother provides the focus for her own interior life, Helen is revealed as a woman engaged in a constant, if intensely private, struggle between the repressive confines of conventional responsibility an