You may know one or two people who have climbed, steadily and smoothly, like eagles on gentle updrafts, way up high to the preferred altitudes of their dream lives, and have been able to circle quite nicely up there. Barbara Schultze has written a novel for the rest of us.
Schultze’s main character is a woman named Avy, a name from the world of birds, and through the opening chapters of the novel, you can almost hear Avy’s life smacking into a sequence of windowpanes. She is laid low by betrayals from friends and coworkers, hostilities from her family members, and just plain rotten luck.
Avy rises up anyway, as best she can, and takes a position as a home-care nurse, a job she never planned on or wanted. “What a come down…from what she was leaving behind,” Avy thinks. After all, she “could be running the place…instead of slogging along in an entry level position.” Harder still, she had agreed to slog in this way for her father’s sake, though she had not seen him in years. His physical and mental conditions were worsening, and prior to that, he had already become a bitter man who regularly hurled cruel verbal assaults at her. No, Avy did not want any of this. Yet her hometown, “Berndbridge,” where Avy herself had burned so many bridges in her younger years, is where she crash-lands, and where she ultimately must invest her talents and her life.
Yet, during this season of reluctant duty, Avy finds the smallest signs of beauty and discovers, to her surprise, some soul-lift in the gritty lives of sick and dying people. She reflects, “Returning to her father’s home and doing this kind of work had been a sacrifice and a struggle, stripping away the toughened protection she had built around her core. The people she encountered had opened her heart to caring and tenderness, the softness she had hidden away in order to survive.” Schultze presents this hope-filled aerodynamic without being trite, overly sanguine, or clichéd about human suffering.
If you have been called upon to stoop down and give sacrificial gifts to people who are sometimes ungrateful, you will appreciate this book. Particularly if you care for elderly parents or siblings, you will find resonance here. Schultze clearly understands, as perhaps nobody else in your family or friend group does, the all-consuming and often heartbreaking duties of love you are called to pour out from your life. You will find guidance for that love in Schultze’s story: not as point-by-point instruction, but as a stance of heart, soul, and mind.
Moreover, there are just the right touches of humor in Trust the Wings. For example, readers find out what happens when Avy is lost without GPS, and a kid at a produce stand points down the road and says, “You can’t miss it. Just look for the virgin in the bathtub.” In such moments, Schultze reveals a vivid imagination, which she happily unfurls in her novel.
Schultze also crafts a delicate approach regarding spiritual things. Clearly, she is an author of faith, but this is no Harlequin novel for Jesus. Religion is woven into the background of things and is occasionally present in the interfaith stories of some of her characters, but there is nothing formulaic about any of it. Avy herself seems to be holding religion at a distance and seems to be sorting it out, even as she comes to grips with the mysteries of her deceased mother and the buried secrets of her troubled, estranged family. Schultze only hints at this spiritual searching, for example, when Avy “wondered who she might be if her father had kept his faith.” Avy is a character who is respectful of the church but seems uncomfortable with it and disappointed by it. This book, then, becomes a tender expression of the spiritual uncertainties and tensions of our times. Schultze does not explain away or resolve those tensions. I appreciated that.
For anyone who has smacked a windowpane, fallen to the ground, and is trembling in the dirt, Schultze has written this book as a warm, friendly nudge. You can just hear her whisper, “Take a moment to gather your courage and summon your resolve, and then rise up again. Trust the Wings.”
2 Responses
Thanks for this lovely review, Keith. You capture the novel’s strength and vision so well.
Barbara workshopped material from her novel in my fiction writing workshop at Scriptoria Workshop before publishing, and received encouragement to keep writing. Subsequently, she asked me to edit the novel for her before Trust the Wings went to press.
I join you in recommending the novel to readers of good fiction.
I have lived this and am anxious to read the perspective of this author. Thank you.