Before Wings

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Life and death, the past and the present, all come together in this
outstanding young-adult novel. In her 13th year, Adrien Wood of
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, had experienced a nearly life-ending brain
aneurysm. Now 15, Adrien, who does not really “live” as much as she
worries about dying and what comes after, is spending the summer working
at Camp Lakeshore, a children’s camp run by her spinster aunt, Erin.
Since Adrien’s near-death experience, she has become aware of
“spirits,” and, in the camp setting, they become increasingly
“solid” until Adrien can see and hear five girls who died 20 years
earlier, when Erin was 18, and their cabin counselor. Adding to the
book’s eerie atmosphere is Adrien’s developing romantic relationship
with Paul Marchand, also 15, who has constant but changing dreams of his
death on his 16th birthday—dreams that have included images of Adrien,
someone he had not met before her camp arrival. The two story
threads—one involving the past and the other the present—come
together in a climactic episode that brings resolution to both by
providing a release to death and an invitation to live.

Goobie’s writing is superb, but it is particularly rich in its
imagery, especially her use of the Mayfly, an insect that, after
spending two years in a lake, grows wings and flies for just one or two
days before dying. The amount of time “before wings,” Adrien learns,
is not nearly as important as “how you lived your life” once you had
them. Highly recommended.