After the Wreck, I Picked Myself up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

In the raw was how the world felt now. My feelings were raw, my thoughts were raw and hurtful like knife blades. . . . In the blue had been my place to hide, now In the raw there was nowhere to hide.

Jenna Abbott separates her life into two categories: before the wreck and after the wreck. Before the wreck, she was leading a normal life with her mom in suburban New York. After the wreck, Jenna is alone, trying desperately to forget what happened that day on the bridge. She's determined not to let anyone get close to her -- she never wants to feel so broken and fragile again.

Then Jenna meets Crow. He is a powerfully seductive enigma, and Jenna is instantly drawn to him. Crow is able to break down the wall that Jenna has built around her emotions, and she surprises herself by telling him things she hasn't told anyone else. Can Jenna bring herself to face the memories she's tried so hard to erase?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061756153
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Lexile:	830L (what's this?)
File size:	757 KB
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Read an Excerpt

After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

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By Joyce Oates

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Joyce Oates
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060735260

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Chapter One

In the blue we were snow geese flying.

These big beautiful white-feathered snow geese flying with a flock of other geese. In the V formation we were flying and our long necks were sticking way out and our eyes were narrow slits in our weird white feather faces. And our wings!

You should have seen our wings pumping the air. Pumping the air, riding the wind.

A thousand feet above the river, pumping the air hard to save our lives.

A song came into my head.

Knew this old world would be a hard hard place Seeing how the snow geese fly, brave wings pumping

Continues...

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Excerpted from After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Oates Copyright © 2006 by Joyce Oates. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

As engrossing as Oates's Sexy, this psychological drama explores how a teen is changed by a devastating automobile accident that leaves her mother dead. Fifteen-year-old Jenna is sitting in the passenger seat when the car her mother is driving careens into the guardrail of the Tappan Zee Bridge. Details of the wreck remain fuzzy to Jenna, but she feels that she may have been responsible for the crash. After her physical injuries heal, her emotional wounds are still raw as she adjusts to a different life, leaving her home in Tarrytown, N.Y., moving to a small New Hampshire town to live with her aunt and uncle and their two younger children. She begins to think of her life in terms of before the wreck and after the wreck, and longs to be "in the blue," the idyllic drug-induced state she experienced in the hospital. Jenna tries to emulate that feeling, turning to a cool but dangerous senior girl, alcohol and drugs and distances herself from the people who love her and want to help her most. It isn't until Jenna develops an unlikely friendship with Crow, a rugged biker from Canada, that she finds the courage to confront and overcome her fears. Throughout this intense novel, the author offers keen insight into the cause and effect of a teen's self-destructive behavior. Readers distraught by Jenna's downward spiral after the wreck will find solace in the book's inspiring conclusion. Ages 14-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 9 Up-Jenna Abbott, 15, is struggling to come to terms with the car accident that killed her mother and nearly took her own life as well. Formerly athletic and smart, she suddenly finds herself unable to concentrate or communicate with anyone. She is broken in both body and spirit and desperate to escape "into the blue," which is how she remembers the drug-induced haze immediately after the accident. Not wanting anything to do with her father and his new family in California, she moves to New Hampshire to live with her aunt and uncle, and begins looking for ways to escape. She steals OxyContin from her uncle's medicine cabinet and becomes friends with Trina, who is dealing with her own substance-abuse problems. It takes two near-disasters for Jenna to tentatively open up to her classmate Crow and face her fears and grief. Oates is at her best telling the stories of teenage girls dealing with internal trauma and outside pressures. Jenna's pain at losing the only person truly close to her and the isolation she creates for herself are poignantly drawn. Her understanding that her choices are not what her mother would want for her is especially telling and may speak to teens in comparable situations. Similar in topic to E. R. Frank's Wrecked (S & S, 2005), this powerful novel is well worth reading.-Stephanie L. Petruso, Anne Arundel County Public Library, Odenton, MD Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Oates's most recent foray into YA fiction won't disappoint fans of her teen writing, especially those who loved Big Mouth and Ugly Girl (2003). After surviving a car accident in which her mother dies, 15-year-old Jenna refuses her father's offer to live with him, choosing instead to live with her aunt and uncle. Although she recovers from her extensive physical injuries, Jenna still must cope with Post-traumatic stress-like symptoms. As many teens under severe emotional stress are apt to do, Jenna makes friends with the wrong crowd, and then dabbles with drugs. Her risky behaviors eventually draw her into an extremely dangerous situation from which she narrowly escapes. Throughout the story, Jenna finds herself inexplicably drawn to Crow, a mysterious boy with a haunted past of his own, causing readers to hope that he will be the key to her recovery. Oates's variation on a stream-of-consciousness style is appropriate for the voice of a character who spends so much time in her own head, but the ending is wrapped up a bit too simply considering all of Jenna's issues. (Fiction. YA)

Kirkus Reviews