Suzanne Simonetti, The Sound of Wings

Four women, young and old, negotiate life’s ups and downs in a seaside resort in The Sound of Wings by Suzanne Simonetti.

Sculptor and shop-owner Goldie Knight contends with waning faculties and crumbling finances even as she’s assailed by the scotch-breathing ghost of her long-dead husband. Neither a rich, adoring mate nor palatial oceanside digs can salve hometown girl Krystal Axelrod’s sense of inferiority, born as it is of high-school awkwardness and childhood poverty. Unflappable-seeming Jocelyn Anderson has a handsome husband, a handsome home, and a contract for her second book, but none of these outweigh her fear of losing custody of her six-year-old son and her crushing case of writer’s block. Finally, Daisy Anderson — long dead before the story’s timeframe, but present through her adolescent diary — struggles with disapproving parents and an evasive lover as she contends with new motherhood. These lives become intertwined — friendships form, acrimonies fade, and Goldie, Krystal, and Jocelyn slay personal demons — as The Sound of Wings wends toward the dark, unexpected secret at its core. In this, her freshman effort, Simonetti excavates an important but oft-overlooked truth — namely, that pain, well, hurts, irrespective of the circumstances under which we suffer it. Goldie, Krystal, and Jocelyn enjoy lives of comparative privilege, but privilege doesn’t lessen the misery their problems inflict. Their resolutions, when they come, are not uniformly happy ones, but it’s in this that the story finds its truth and aspires to the level of literature.

Simonetti’s writing is facile but short of lyrical. Yet approachability, not lyricism, is what she’s working to achieve. The story’s animating secret may feel a bit unearned. Still, Simonetti’s promise as a writer is evident and one looks forward to her future outings.

You can buy The Sound of Wings at your local bookstore or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its profit to independent booksellers. The joy of capitalism is that one can reward those one favors and punish the entitled. Let’s inflict a little pain on Amazon and look out for the little guys.