Enormous Wings

A Novel

By: Laurie Frankel

Narrated by: Becky Ann Baker

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author Laurie Frankel, an exuberant and timely new novel.

This program is read by actor Becky Ann Baker, who has appeared in Freaks and Geeks and Girls.

At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. She fears it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: She’s pregnant.

As word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, belly-rubbers and rubber-neckers all descending on Vista View while Pepper struggles to determine her next move. Soon she has some hard decisions to make—and some she’s not allowed to make.

Enormous Wings is an urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about what happens when you don’t get to choose anymore. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks—even so late in the day—can still change, and then change everything.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company

Love this author

Frankel is a wonderful storyteller. I’ve read all of her books and each story is unique and breathtaking.

Loved it!

Such a funny, honest book. An amazing way to explore a controversial topic. Unpredictable but held together by love.

Spoilers. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I should like this book better but I’m just annoyed.

1. The author shortchanges older people. I’m a 74 year old retired English teacher and know how to use my phone and technology just fine thank you very much. Teachers have used computers and received tech training for decades. They stay up to date with what’s going on in the world. The author shortchanges people in their 70s.

2. Pepper loses her license because of one fender bender and no one checks her eyesight? Her daughter forces her into assisted living and she doesn’t push back? Come on.

3. A Jewish woman riffs on the immaculate conception as if she accepts the story and fact? Made no sense.

4. A neat red bow ending, everybody happy and content, a Texas cop coming to apologize, all order restored, but with nobody ever making plans for a child whose parents will likely die within a decade, or having that thought seemingly never cross their minds.

5. Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez comments deeply about our religious expectations, human greed and selfishness, our inability to actually live our ideals and more. It’s strange, symbolic, and profound. These enormous wings take an over-romanticized, rose-colored glasses view of the world that makes for a much shallower experience.

It’s light. The characters are likable. Narration excellent. Too fluffy for me.