Review: We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

24041443From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Language of Flowers comes her much-anticipated new novel about young love, hard choices, and hope against all odds.

For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children—Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six—in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty’s parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life.

Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she’s worked for and her family’s fragile hopes for the future.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh blends gorgeous prose with compelling themes of motherhood, undocumented immigration, and the American Dream in a powerful and prescient story about family.

 

My Thoughts:

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My Very First Book Haul!

Does adding “very” to a sentence like that make it sound like I’m talking to a child? Or I am a child? I guess I have some level of childish excitement, considering I have so many books this month! Also, about the whole “I’ll post every three days” thing… Yeah. Sorry that didn’t work out. Life is too busy. But I’ll post whenever I can.

In other news, I’ve made a “Books I’ve Reviewed” page to organize things a little, and because I’m an obsessive neat-freak, I ‘ve organized them by title, by author, and by star rating!

Anyways, I’ve received more books this month than I’ve ever gotten at one time before, so I actually have enough to show off for a book haul! Let’s hop to it!

 

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There’s my stack. Isn’t it lovely? Biggest I’ve ever had- all at once at least. Other than two I’m DNFing and the nesting manuals, I’ll be reviewing every one of these beauties on the blog! I’ll break them down by where I got them.

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The Shack and Crazy Love were both lends from a good friend of mine. I’m looking forward to the Shack, but I think Crazy Love is going to be a DNF, if only because it’s making me feel like a horrible person.

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These three, The Selection, The Girl with all the Gifts, and Fairest were all bought at Barnes and Noble. I’ve read the first two and am SO excited for Fairest. I’ll be reviewing The Selection with The Book Dame (and giving it a good review) and The Girl with All the Gifts by myself soonish (and giving it a not-so-good review.)

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These two are NetGalley books! The Feuds is my second DNF, and because it’s a NetGalley, I’ll actually be writing a review on why. We Never Asked for Wings is by the same author as The Language of Flowers, which I loved (and might write a post on eventually) and it’ll be the first book that I’ll have ever read because of the author. That sounds crazy, right?

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These three are from my local library, and will probably be my next reads, considering I have two weeks to return them. Looking forward to the last two, which the librarian promised would be ‘quirky’.

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Aaaand finally, these four beauties were inherited by The Book Dame, who is currently moving. Yay for people needing to get rid of stuff! I’ve already read Scarlet, but it was the only book of the Lunar Chronicles that I didn’t own, since I’d originally borrowed it from her. Glad to say that it’s all mine now! But you can read her review for it here. As for all the home books, I won’t be reviewing them of course since it’d be a little tricky to review.. a manual… but I might be doing a feature on the My Garden book when I have more time to look at it. This would coincide with The Language of Flowers I was talking about earlier. More on that later.

So that’s my first haul! Very pleased with the amount of books I have to look forward to, and I can’t wait to start reviewing them on the blog! So how’s everyone else doing? It’s been so long- tell me about your lives!