Early on, I recall thinking of books as movies you create in your head. When a novel features characters that are fully actualized and places them in circumstances beyond their control, it creates a blended feeling of excitement and impatience. The anticipation of “What will happen next?” propels the plot forward, building a heightened, personal interest in people and places that linger in the back of your mind anytime you have to step away. I was so engrossed in the story created in Michelle Theall’s The Wind Will Catch You that I devoured it in two days, immediately turning back to the first page to comb through details I’d overlooked. For fans of Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn), this novel is a moving example of discovering resilience against a hopeless backdrop and finding stability in a world whose ground has done nothing but crumble beneath your feet.
The Wind Will Catch You points to the many nuanced failings of the U.S. foster care system. With so many broken systems of bureaucracy in the U.S. it can be tempting to lump them all together and chalk it up to “that’s just the way things are.” Theall’s story pushes back against this line of thought by lifting the veil of ignorance and creating a character so full that her story reads as a fictional memoir of lived experiences under this flawed system. Sky’s story brings this understanding directly to the forefront, reminding us that these are not just files and cases, but innocent children who must bear the brunt of the suffering – kids born into situations beyond their control upon which the entire course of their lives can be determined. As Sky reveals her layered past, the injustice and reality of the situation is centered, capturing the before, during and after of poverty, neglect, and loss of identity in the child welfare system.
We first encounter our protagonist, twenty-year-old Sky Fielder, as she meets with her caseworker, Laura, a woman just three years her senior working to find her feet with a career in social services. An incessant caller interrupts their meeting, which Sky reminds herself is simply that, a required, mandatory meeting with her government assigned caseworker, despite the quiet sadness of an unspoken wish: “I wonder what it would be like if we were just two normal girls, dishing about classes and crushes over lattes. But I remember what’s real: she gets paid to meet with me.” The caller is Dr. Kaya Nez from Banner Medical University in Tucson, Arizona. She calls Sky by her former last name, Rayner, a name she hasn’t used in years. She’s told her brother, Ben, whom she believed has been dead for the past twelve years, is a patient at the hospital in critical condition, and she is the only family member they’ve been able to reach to make important medical decisions on his behalf.
We then flash back to 2007: Sky is eight and her brother Ben is fourteen; social services has shown up to their house after calls home from the school go unanswered. The siblings have been living alone in the rural hills of Eden Park, West Texas, their parents buried next to their trailer. As the story unravels, details are filled in through conversations between Laura and Sky, taking place in 2019; flickering memories filtered through the childhood perspective of Sky which she now must revisit and reexamine for what they are: “Papa taking medicine, stored in a cigar box next to the tin where we kept our case. Mama disappearing for weeks at a time.” As Sky and Laura grow closer, Sky comes to understand just how disorganized and disheveled the child welfare system is, “Reconstituted facts, you know, thrown up and digested again and again. Like we’re baby birds. That’s it. You think records get passed along? Hell, half of them aren’t even accurate.”
Sky leans into the opportunity to share her story through her own words, telling Laura about her adoptive parents and the ways in which she went against their perfect image of a conservative, religious, Southern household. Theall’s dynamic use of narration indirectly informs Sky’s experience at different stages of their relationship. When she first arrives at her new home, she refers to her adoptive parents and Mr. and Mrs. Fielder. As their relationship develops, she begins referring to them as Mom and Dad. She tells Laura of her guilt-ridden feelings for another girl at school when she was young, and the ensuing choices she felt obligated to make to maintain the rigid, heteronormative standards her adoptive parents held her to. We learn the heart-wrenching magnitude of the consequences of these choices and nod along as Laura tells Sky, “You might just be the strongest person I know.”
Theall creates a narrative so compelling, it feels impossible to not root for Sky against the odds. The story is well-structured, utilizing dates and italics to differentiate journal entries from storytelling and grounding the story to a specific time and place. Natural dialogue and complex characters and situations offer a prime example of the inability to know someone’s story or what they’ve endured through assumption alone. The Wind Will Catch You is a novel that has stayed with me well beyond the final page, and I look forward to reading Michelle Theall’s memoir, Teaching the Cat to Sit, for even further insight.
FICTION
The Wind Will Catch You
By Michelle Theall
Alcove Press
Published September 19, 2023
Southern Review of Books 