all of us with wings by michelle ruiz keil

She gets a tattoo, tries drugs, and has ill-advised sex. Xochi is challenging in exactly the way a teenager with no supervision and a lot of sorrow might be. “It’s reflective of how I experience the world.” Despite their unusual lives, the characters are recognizably, and stubbornly, human. “For me, magical realism is kind of an everyday Tuesday,” Keil says. The book casts an uneasy, but nonetheless magical, spell on the reader.īut the story never feels too far from reality. “My stories’ bones are made of fairy tales,” Keil says, and she doesn’t mean the Disney kind. Keil jumps among perspectives as Xochi-and the nature spirits she and Pallas accidentally summon-upsets the balance of this unconventional family. Fleeing trauma and loss, 17-year-old Xochi, who is queer and biracial (Mexican American and white), finds herself in San Francisco working as a governess to Pallas, the precocious child of a group of polyamorous rock stars. That’s the central question of Keil’s debut, All of Us With Wings. But, novelist Michelle Ruiz Keil asks, “What if you weren’t able to do that path and you were on your own and trying to create your own meaningful rites of passage?” What does it look like to create your own life from scratch when you’re barely out of childhood? For some teens, there is a very clear path to the future: Finish high school, go to college, get a job, start a family.

All of us with wings by michelle ruiz keil