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Little
Wing
by Joanne
Horniman
Published
by Allen and Unwin
180 pages,
2006
Buy it
online
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Light in the Gloom
Reviewed
by Sue Bursztynski
In the novel Mahalia we met a
teenaged father named Matt. While his friends from school
were getting on with homework and sport and swimming in the
river, Matt was caring full-time for his baby daughter,
Mahalia, after his girlfriend Emily, Mahalia's mother, had
run away from them both.
It was a sweet, gentle story about a boy who is too young
for parenthood, but nevertheless handles it as best he can,
without regret. During the story, Matt learned about
himself, bonded strongly with his child and even found a new
girlfriend.
In Little Wing, we find out what Emily was doing
while Matt was caring for their child. As the novel
progresses, we gradually come to understand why she felt it
necessary to leave her partner and child behind. We can feel
more sympathy for her than in the first novel, when she was,
for most of the novel, the offstage character who had
abandoned Matt to look after their child all by himself.
We learn that Emily has been living in the Blue Mountains
outside Sydney, with her gentle hippyish godmother
Charlotte, trying to come to terms with her life. In
flashback, we follow her through her pregnancy, the decision
to give birth despite her parents' pressure to abort and the
first few months with Matt and Mahalia. She is gradually
healing, with Charlotte's help and the friendship of a kind
young stay-at-home father and his little boy. Her friendship
with the little boy, Pete, helps prepare her for a
relationship with her own child. Like Matt, Emily is too
young in many ways to be a parent, which doesn't stop her
thinking of herself as a "bad mother." Her relationship with
her own parents is not the best, and is one of the problems
she must tackle before she feels ready to return to her home
and family. Her parents, who feel they have lost her, also
need to learn before they are ready to welcome her home.
There are many young adult novels about teen pregnancy and
parenthood. They have been around since YA novels have been
a separate genre. It's a subject teenagers -- especially
girls -- read with great fascination, because it's an issue
that could so easily apply to them. It's a common enough
thing, goodness knows, and many girls have a friend or a
relative or a friend of a friend who has become
pregnant.
They tend to be darker than this one and its companion novel
(each of which can be read as a stand-alone novel). Usually,
the heroine has to deal with the pregnancy alone, because
the boyfriend doesn't want to take any responsibility. The
author of Little Wing recognizes the fact that the
young couple have been a little over-idealistic in thinking
they could handle parenthood, and no one suggests that
teenagers should rush out and have babies, but on the whole,
they have handled it quite well, both of them truly loving
their baby and wanting the best for her. Nobody judges them.
Neither of them regrets their decision to have the baby.
Girls should enjoy this novel and its companion volume. It
is not too long for even a reluctant reader and is fairly
easy reading, a novel that can be completed in a day or two
by a good reader and perhaps a week by a slower one. The
gentleness is an attractive feature of this story. You can
have too much tragedy, even if kids often do enjoy gloom in
their fiction.
Recommended. | November 2006
Sue
Bursztynski
is the author of several children's books, including the CBC
Notable Book Potions To Pulsars: Women Doing Science
and Your Cat Could Be A Spy. Her fiction has been
published in various SF magazines. She publishes two blogs,
a general one at http://greatraven.blogspot.com
and a review/SF blog at http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.
She lives in Australia.
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