Oprah's Book Club may be on hiatus, but here is another
Oprah "pick" you won't want to miss!
Before Women Had Wings is Connie May Fowler's third novel, and it has been chosen as the premiere "Oprah Winfrey Presents" television movie, to air in November.
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Before Women Had Wings is a powerful tale of retribution and salvation, of hope and love. Bird Jackson narrates her own childhood, and the life of her family, with startling honesty. We see her father, wanting so badly to see the limelight of country music; her sister, entering womanhood; her mother, trying to hold it together in what becomes a tragic course of events. Then there's Bird herself, sifting through the remains of her family's life; meeting a healer named Miss Zora who prays over the winged creatures, attempting to guide their souls into heaven. The theme of flight runs throughout this magnificent novel. About her mother, Bird says: "She named both her children after birds, her logic being that if we were named after something with wings then maybe we'd be able to fly . . ."
Connie received a full scholarship to the University of Tampa where she began publishing poetry in small presses. Connie dropped out of school when her mother died of cirrhosis and traveled through Mexico and the United States for two years. She returned to the university and earned a B.A. in English and then worked as a freelance writer. In 1987, she married Mika Fowler and moved to Kansas, where she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Kansas. She intended to study poetry, but a professor encouraged her to take a class in fiction writing. "That suggestion turned everything around for me. The fiction professor treated me for the first time in my life as if I was truly a writer. With her, everything coalesced. Fiction suddenly made sense to me." Connie and Mika returned to Florida after she received her M.A. in English, and they continue to live there. Connie is also known as an environmental activist in Florida -- she travels and speaks about the preservation of her native state.
Connie has been praised for her "genius of characterization" by the Boston Globe, for her "trusting and attuned ear" by the Miami Herald, and her ability "to present the ponderous problems her characters face with a style and grace that takes your breath away," according to the St. Petersburg Times. She is the author of three novels, Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, and BEFORE WOMEN HAD WINGS, which was the winner of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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