Commentary: Above Us Only Sky by Michele Young-Stone

Done right, family sagas are like coming home. Done wrong, family sagas are like stumbling into someone else's house and wishing you hadn't come. ⁣
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Above Us Only Sky by Michele Young-Stone is the Vilkas family saga, exploring bird girls, trauma, and Lithuanian history. ⁣
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The reason I picked up this book is two-fold: 1) It is about Lithuania, a country in Eastern Europe that I wish to better understand and 2) it is a family saga, much like my own novel that I am currently working on. While I found much to love in the story, what I learned the most from was Young-Stone's mistakes. These mistakes did not ruin the story. Not once did these mistakes make me want to put down the book and give up. These mistakes, rather, made me appreciate just how hard it is to write a family saga effectively. ⁣
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For those of you who may not know, a family saga is a sub-genre that focuses on a family over the course of time. That period of time can span a dozen generations or just two. The inner workings of families-- their dynamics, their struggles, their legacies-- this is the focus of a family saga. I find that most often they also fall under the category of historical fiction, as is the case with Above Us Only Sky and also The Book of Fathers. But family sagas can also fall under Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance, Mystery-- anything. The point of family sagas is to capture the essence of how families work, revealing their downfalls, speaking to the violence they carry, while also touching on what makes us love one another, what can bring us together after our injuries, and why we choose family life at all. ⁣
One of the greatest struggles of writing a family saga is defining the structure-- deciding how and when to reveal information and to what end. If writers aren't careful, family sagas can turn into history textbooks, or, perhaps worse, they come across as jumbled, confusing, and without impact. Above Us Only Sky never felt like a history textbook. The characters were too compelling for that. But I would be lying if I claimed the structure lent to the story in a positive way.

This structure is not necessarily a poor one. My complaint is that it did not feel nearly as purposeful as it could have. Had Young-Stone structured the story with more intent and strategy, then I think the book would have felt less like a first draft and more like a fully-realized narrative.

When you are writing about family histories, there requires great planning to present the story in ways that are meaningful-- ways that tie the characters across time and space together so that the reader feels the gravity of their encounters, in their decisions, and in there coming together. Some family sagas base their structures on the repetition of symbols-- details that unite and speak to the experience of being that family, what it means to be a Vilkas.

In Above Us Only Sky, there are many such details that pop up throughout, but the one done most successfully are the wings.

Prudence is not the only member of her family to be born with wings. Her great, great grandmother was born with them too. And her great aunt, Daina, whose life we learn the most about-- perhaps more than any other character in the book. The wings; however, don't function as tools of escape-- away from the horrors of living through violence at the hands of the Germans and the Russians. The wings function more so as tools of humanity. When other characters interact with the winged women, they walk away with a newfound sense of wonder, love, and kindness towards humanity. And such love is even more beautiful when compared to the horrors of gulags, forced relocations, mass graves, and sexual violence. But for Prudence, living in the 1980s and 1990s in America, her wings only remind her of loss-- the loss of her wings themselves from surgery as an infant, the loss of her family unit after her parents' divorce, the loss of her best friend, Wheaton, and the losses her ancestors have grieved all their lives.

The wings, in my opinion, are what tie the story all together. Young-Stone does a marvelous job of exploring these wings and imparting to her readers that they are important. Some of the most powerful scenes in the book arise from the wings. They are like religious experiences-- holy and life-changing. I only wish Young-Stone had leaned even harder on these wings, adapting them to be not just symbols but also the infrastructure for the rest of the story to hinge on. Had the wings functioned as the framework of the story's structure, then I believe Young-Stone's characters would have felt a bit less like characters and more like people; I believe Young-Stone's scenes would have felt less like random occurrences and more like a unified tapestry; I believe Young-Stone's themes would have felt less like wandering and more like landing-- like finding home.

As I said before: Done right, family sagas are like coming home. Done wrong, family sagas are like stumbling into someone else's house and wishing you hadn't come.

At the end of the day, I am glad I stumbled into the Vilkas household-- the lives of the Vilkas family are rich, cruel, and memorable. I only wish that, as I turned the last page, I wanted to return to that home again one day.

Lauralei’s Instagram @rebelmouthedbooks: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4I9T3VgD3t/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link