On Wings of the Morning
by Marie Bostwick
Summary
Thanks to the famous flier father he’s never met, Morgan Glennon’s destiny points straight up into Oklahoma’s clear, blue sky. Leaving college and enlisting as a Navy pilot, Morgan’s whole world changes when America goes to war. The joy Morgan always felt in the air is robbed as he watches his friends fall in battle, and it will take one very unusual woman to help him get it back…
Georgia Jean Carter learned early to never rely on a man. Instead, she found her security in airplanes. The war allows Georgia a special sense of belonging when she becomes a pilot for the WASP. Yet there’s something missing that Georgia doesn’t recognize until a brief encounter sets her dreaming about a young flyboy she barely knows…
Excerpt
Prologue
Morgan
Knowing who I am, you might think I was born to fly. Probably there is something to that. If the yearning for flight is something you can inherit from your parents like blue eyes or a bad temper, then I suppose I come by it honestly enough. But if that is true, then it might just be the only honest piece of my birthright.
Though it was years before we could talk about my father, Mama says that even as a little boy I sensed the truth, or at least part of it. She still speaks in hushed amazement of the night of my fourth birthday, the night she tucked me in under her present to me, a quilt of the Oklahoma night sky appliquéd with star points over a field of cobalt and midnight, stitched by hand with the three strand thread that held Mama’s whole world together—imagination, determination, and secrets. There was so much we couldn’t, or didn’t talk about.
And I wanted to know everything. Things about her. About me. About why, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she would fix her eyes on closed doors as though waiting for someone to open them. Who was she waiting for? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Somehow I sensed that if I pulled on the strand that stood for secrets, all of us would unravel at the seams.
Maybe that’s why I made up the story I told her that night, about the father I’d imagined for myself, a father who’d died and flew a recon mission to heaven, just to make sure the coast was clear for me. I knew he was an invention, but an invented father was better than a void. Mama’s eyes welled up when I told her my story, but they were happy tears, I could tell. Somehow I’d hit upon something right, something that caused a flickered light of hope to shine though her tears. I rolled my tale out as a bolt of whole cloth, woven with equal parts of plausibility and fabrication and Mama did what she always did, the courageous thing which made me love her so; she embellished it with explanations and appliquéd on a desire for things the way they should have been and by the time I closed my eyes to sleep we’d stitched a story so sincere and inviting that it could nearly have passed for truth. Nearly.
If the truth is to be told, and I think the time has come, it wasn’t my heritage that drove me to the sky. It was the secrets. I didn’t know the first time I pulled the stick back and nosed my plane skyward, breaking through a bank of bleached muslin clouds into a field of brilliant, edgeless blue that I’d finally found the place I belonged, the only place where my skin didn’t feel as if it was bound too tight around my soul. The longing was always there, but how could I have known what it was I longed for? I was just trying to outrun the secrets.
Reviews
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6480269.html
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5535587/On%20Wings%20of%20the%20Morning%20by%20Marie%20Bostwick
Author's Biography
Marie Bostwick is an award winning author of three historical fiction novels. Marie lives in Connecticut and travels frequently to sign books, speak to reading groups, and meet her readers. She is currently working on a new novel set to be published by the end of 2008.