Feb 23 2009
Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson
When I first started reading Asta in the Wings I thought of another Tin House book Salvation by Lucia Nevai. Both have central characters who are girls raised by less than ideal mothers and who are adopted by odd but caring surrogate mothers. Both stories focus on the transition from one world to the next that is involved in being taken from your family and placed elsewhere.
But despite their similarities they are quite different. If Crane Cavanaugh in Salvation comes from a clearly neglectful to the point of abusive home, Asta Hewitt is raised in a less clear cut situation. And that is where the story lies.
Here is PWs one sentence description:
Seven-year-old Asta grows up in rural Maine in the late 1970s, where she and her sickly nine-year-old brother, Orion, are kept locked in their house by their crazy mother, who fills their heads with tales of the plague-ravaged wasteland waiting outside their door.
At first you think perhaps their mother was just eccentric, and emotionally unstable, but not a clear threat to the children’s ultimate welfare. But soon you realize that as creative and intelligent as the kids are, they are surviving and growing despite their mother’s actions rather than from her care. She loves them but is not equipped or able to be a parent.
Once circumstances force Asta and Orion to explore the outside world it becomes that much more clear how warped their life inside the house was; imaginative and intimate in many ways but warped. The story, however, is about how the two children come to grips with this childhood and try to relate to their mother moving forward.
