After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away Summary and Reviews

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates X
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates
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Book Summary

Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge.

Then she meets Crow. He is a powerfully seductive enigma, and Jenna is instantly drawn to him. Crow is able to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions, and she surprises herself by telling him things she hasn't told anyone else. Can Jenna bring herself to face the memories she's tried so hard to erase?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Oates's style makes for a compelling reading experience, and although Jenna is not necessarily a likable girl, readers will care what happens to her as she finds her way back after the tragedy." - KLIATT.
"There is too much going on, with everything spelled out, including the metaphor of [Jenna's] need to cross over the treacherous bridge. But Oates gets the contemporary teen voice just right".

This information about After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away 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.

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Author Information

Joyce Carol Oates Author Biography

Photo by Dustin Cohen

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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