Wenny Has Wings

'When I died, the first thing I did was speed through a dark tunnel. And it took me straight to the afterworld.' It turns out, however, that 11-year-old Will North, the speaker of these words, is one of the few people who have had a near-death experience and that he has returned to everyday Californian life with his parents. The complication is that in the accident which almost took his life, his younger sister Wenny has been killed. Carey's novel, often extremely poignant and frequently unexpectedly amusing, not merely depicts Will's sense of loss and his (and his family's) efforts to move towards some kind of acceptance of the tragedy, but also delineates his own slow growth towards the independence of early adolescence. Written entirely as a sequence of letters from surviving brother to dead sister, this is a skilfully structured story which constitutes an impressive addition to those children's novels dealing with death and its consequences.