Wings to Soar
Forty percent of the world’s 47 million refugees are under the age of 18. In the middle-grade novel Wings to Soar, Tina Athaide uses short-line poetry to voice one refugee child’s journey from despair and isolation to a new beginning in America in 1972. We meet Viva, a ten-year-old Ugandan Asian child, with her deeply depressed mother and withdrawn sister in a dreary English refugee camp. Viva has no idea where her beloved father is, if he’s even alive, and clings to their old game of pretending she’s Diana Ross, bursting with “Supremeness,” even when her world is far from supreme.
We follow Viva to a grubby and viciously racist sojourn in Southwall to a slightly better environment as hope rises and falls that she’ll ever see her father. Athaide portrays Viva’s troubles so vividly that marginalized, suffering children everywhere can say with her: “I don’t know why my life turned horribly wrong.” They’ll sympathize with her when anger “cracks like thunder and explodes filling all the space inside Varun Uncle’s tiny beetle bug car.” And young readers of every faith or none can pray with her: “Please, please, please make everything all right.”
The depths of Viva’s despair are countered by her soaring sense of self, her gift for friendship, and her sometimes misguided schemes to reunite her family. The happy ending owes much to Viva’s indomitable faith and growing empathy, and the help of caring adults around her.
While Wings to Soar is a chunky 343 pages, short lines and a propulsive story line will pull even reluctant readers through on Viva’s rocky journey to joy. Ages 10-12.
