Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jun 2019
360 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Michelle Ruiz Keil's YA fantasy debut about love, found family, and healing is an ode to post-punk San Francisco through the eyes of a Mexican-American girl.
Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rockstar family in one of the city's storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas's live-in governess and quickly finds her place in the girl's tight-knit household, which operates on a free-love philosophy and easy warmth despite the band's growing fame.
But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas perform a riot-grrrl ritual in good fun, accidentally summoning a pair of ancient beings bound to avenge the wrongs of Xochi's past. She would do anything to preserve her new life, but with the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those who've hurt her, no one is safe—not the family Xochi's chosen, nor the one she left behind.
"This tale of found family and recovery weaves an unforgettable punk rock-infused spell." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Keil's atmospheric debut conjures up a setting both seductive and dangerous for her diverse cast of flawed characters." - Publishers Weekly
"Intriguing and well-crafted." - YA Books Central
"Keil is at her best playing with the magical realism element ... using lush, imagistic prose to cast a dreamy (sometimes nightmarish) pall over the scenes."
- Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books
"A spellbinding tale about finding magic in the mundane and hope in the unknown. Filled with dizzying danger and electrifying music, All of Us with Wings left me breathless." - Ruth Ozeki Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author of A Tale for the Time Being
"Michelle Ruiz Keil creates a vivid and original novel full of music, rage, and characters that sing with purpose. Keil is a new voice to keep an eye on." - Zoraida Córdova, award-winning author of Labyrinth Lost
"A love letter to live music, a poem to a city in novel form, and a poignantly nuanced examination of the ways in which performance impacts life on and off stage. In equal parts realistic detail and surreal vision, All of Us with Wings bursts off the page and goes with you into real life." - Anna-Marie McLemore, author of Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours and Blanca & Roja
"All of Us with Wings is a decadent slice of post-punk rockstardom that will have you begging to stay at the party till sunrise. This gorgeous debut looks unflinchingly into often unexplored experiences of adolescence—abuse and addiction, lust and desire, found families and chosen homes—finding beauty and redemption even in the darkest places." - Tehlor Kay Mejia, author of We Set the Dark on Fire
"I'm convinced that Michelle Ruiz Keil has woven a magic spell into these pages. All of Us with Wings is gorgeous, gritty, and utterly transfixing." - Sara Holland, New York Times bestselling author of Everless
"Michelle Ruiz Keil puts exquisite language and wild imagination to the fierce onslaught of sensation and doubt that is adolescence. This is a story for young adults, but perhaps it is also a deeply poetic tale of what is lost in the transition to adulthood." - Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange
This information about All of Us with Wings was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Ruiz Keil is a Latinx novelist and playwright. She teaches writing and curates All Kinds of Fur: A Fairytale Reading Series and Salon in Portland, Oregon. She has been a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Lit Camp and is a member of Las Musas, a collective of Latinx kidlit authors. Her published short fiction can be found on Cosmonauts Avenue and in the forthcoming anthology Color Outside the Lines. All of Us with Wings is her first novel.
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