The premise of Laurie Frankel's Enormous Wings—the title taken from an oft-anthologized Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story—is deeply intriguing. A 77-year-old woman moves to an assisted living facility after a small car accident makes her children worry for her safety. She meets a handsome and charismatic 78-year-old man, who goes by the ridiculous name Moth, and promptly gets pregnant after a night of intimacy. Oh, and her name? Pepper Mills.
The names are a sign of what is wrong with this book. At its heart, it is about the end of Roe vs. Wade and the state of women's healthcare in an increasingly misogynistic country. Pepper lives in Texas, so her health at 77 is not as important as the health of the cluster of cells in her uterus. The novel is populated with people on both sides of the abortion debate, and Pepper herself is wishy-washy at times, which was, for me, the biggest failing of the book. Give her a spine. Have her take a stand. Instead, everything seems to just happen to her.
Towards the end, she becomes an activist—I won't spoil it by telling you exactly what that means--but it was all just a bit too far-fetched with too little teeth for my taste.