by David Sosnowski
"A wonderful, terrible new virus is stalking America: Angelism. It starts like the flu, turns your skin green, and ends...in wings.
"As the virus spreads, it creates both a new race of people who look like angels but certainly don't feel like them inside, and wing-free Pedestrians, who are left behind to wait and worry. And while the wing-inflicted play tag with the seagulls, the Peds grow envious, some even going for the jugular--either for harm's sake, or to contrive their own infection.
"In this new world, who will fly and who will falter? In David Sosnowski's Rapture, Zander Wiles is the first victim of Angelism to go public. But his status as celebrity quickly turns to pariah; his experiences at the hands of his disapproving parents and a fickle media turn the world's first flesh-and-blood Angel into a bitter recluse. Alone and grounded, Zander doesn't understand that the first step to flying is throwing yourself at the ground...and missing.
"Zander's life is in utter eclipse until he meets bestselling Angel therapist Cassie O'Connor. Using skates and tough love, Cassie teaches Zander how to face, squarely and deeply, just what he is. Along the way, she also teaches him how to fly."
This book is well written and very original. While at times the prose gets in the way of the story, I still find it to be a beautiful, sometimes painful, but ulimately satisfying read. I highly recommend this book.
Zander Wiles realizes that a bout of flu-like symptoms has left him with something a little out of the ordinary, and quite permanent.
""I've sprouted wings?" he asked aloud.
Which was progress, actually-his admitting it. In the beginning, and for more than an hour, it had gone something like this:
"Zander looks in the mirror.
"The wings rustle.
"He faints.
"He dreams he's had a dream about growing wings.
"He gets up.
"He looks in the mirror.
"He sees his wings, again.
"They shrug and he feels the realness of them ripple through his muscles.
"He faints again.
"Et cetera.
"Of course, Zander's wings were an especially dreadful sight-huge, crow black, the feathers all messed up and starched with dried blood. Luckily, however, he'd been spared the worst of it, the part when his wing stumps first poked through-naked, obscene little sprouts, like two impossibly long, twice-jointed index fingers. Starting at twenty-seven inches each-nine inches between each knuckle-their length doubled, and then doubled again over the next several weeks. And even the noise of their growing was horrible, like the skull-deep bone-splinter of a tooth being pulled...
""I look like a seagull," he said, out loud-something he'd been doing more of lately, seeing as he was crazy, anyway.
""I look like a f**king seagull," he repeated, "on the losing end of an oil spill.""