Wing Jones

"This novel was the winner of the Great Reads Award junior category in 2017. Wing is the main character. She looks up to her older brother Marcus, who is a very popular and successful football player with a beautiful girlfriend. Wing and Marcus live with their widowed mother and two grannies, their maternal and paternal grannies. They are. It’s a mixed race family, Wing’s father was Ghanaian and her mother is Chinese, so you have the Ghanaian and Chinese grannies in the household. Throughout the novel there is an extended metaphor of a dragon representing the Chinese granny and a lioness representing the Ghanaian granny, the duality in Wing’s heritage, and in those forms they support her inner mind. Among the important characters there’s also Aaron, Marcus’ best friend. Wing holds a secret attraction to him. She’s very conscious of her mixed race, of sticking out rather than standing out, so her self identity is very negative. She thinks herself as ugly, whereas Marcus seems to have all the handsomeness and the good physical traits from his mixed parentage. The complication to the narrative quickly unfolds when Marcus is at a party, gets into a car drunk, is involved in a collision which kills two people and ends up in a coma. From that Wing’s story of growth and self confidence begins. I could see myself in Wing. She’s shy, and I was painfully shy as a youngster. I was also drawn to the running motif and the confidence building side of sport, which helps Wing cope with what’s happening with her brother and with the bullying at school. Running becomes a way of coping with bullying, it gives her something she is good at and a network of friends on the track team and a sense of belonging. And it brings her closer to Aaron, who is a runner too. Wing is beginning to have a sense of being somebody other than Marcus’ little sister. She’s finding her own identity and when she comes face to face with her nemesis at school, Wing’s response is that the bully can’t get inside her head anymore. A very often overlooked measure for managing bullying is to build confidence in our young people through sport or any skill that brings a sense of belonging. We’ll always have adversity, we’ll always have difficult challenges in life, and we can’t always be protected from what’s going to happen. I think there should be a more conscious and proactive effort in education for young people to build the confidence and the skills to cope. Another reason I thought this is a great read for teens is the range of emotions in the book. There’s the guilt that the family carries in regard to the accident, the anger that they feel towards Marcus, and yet that they love him. There are very mixed emotions there. There’s a loneliness, and then there are those moments when somebody is kind to Wing and she realises that she should be kind to another character in the novel. There’s a desperate feeling of helplessness that the mother and the grannies experience, the fear about what’s going to happen with Marcus, how they are going to pay their medical bills. And then there’s the feeling of exhilaration that comes with Wing’s successes on the track, and the love between the youngsters as well. So there’s a whole range of human experiences there and I think they’re very realistically depicted, very valid. It’s a very honest portrayal of the range of human emotion that you can have in this kind of a storyline. Yes, Wing is a lovable character. You get into the way she feels and you want her to do well, you want her to get together with Aaron. But another thing that’s interesting is that as she gets involved with Aaron, she realises – and this is a mark of her maturity – that for her to focus on her running ambition she has to set her relationship with Aaron aside without pushing him away. So she’s got a good head on her shoulders, she’s not carried away by the romance of it all. She finds the words to explain how she feels and what she needs at that point in time, which is for him to be there for her and wait for her, so it’s a lovely development in her growth. This is just a really well written novel with no whistles or bells. It’s very simply written, but it’s very lyrical, and you’ve got lovely descriptions in it."