Comfort in the Wings by Jennifer Collins
What's It About?
Grief can be isolating. It brings a sense of shame, the embarrassment that we are not strong enough to shake free of it. We make those around us uncomfortable because they don’t know what to say. They fall back on platitudes — “sorry for your loss” — or say nothing at all, thinking silence is showing respect, which intensifies the loneliness, the emptiness.This is what Larissa Whitcomb is experiencing in Jennifer Collins’ debut novel, Comfort in the Wings. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in four days,” she muses in the very first sentence of the book. Collins drops her readers right into Larissa’s helplessness: she cannot open her mail, answer her phone or leave the house.
It’s not clear right away what’s happened. Collins introduces Larissa’s tragedies little by little, which will make readers wonder how much more she can take; but she’s stronger than she admits to herself. Refusing to rely on meds, she tries gentle yoga, a no-nonsense therapist, dinner with friends, even prayer. Her willingness to try, to look around her instead of inside herself, is what gives her the tiniest scraps of comfort.
She’s persuaded to travel to the Finger Lakes region of New York to discuss a new business project, a trip that requires a couple of connecting flights, hotels and a rental car; a trip that gets worse and worse with weather delays, flight cancellations and talkative strangers. The time alone, forced on her rather than self-inflicted, opens Larissa’s battered heart.
And she listens — to the doctors, to her friends, to a woman weeping on the plane. She gathers up bits of wisdom and comfort and begins to see that the universe is trying to help. Folklore about birds and butterflies being a connection to the spirit world, to those we love who have passed away, rings solid and true with Larissa; she is consoled by a sighting of either. She is consoled by these coincidences and, piecing them together, she sees the possibility of hope.
Comfort in the Wings is not just for those who have suffered unbearable loss. Collins has Larissa experience just about every emotion on the spectrum. Readers can identify with her conflict, indecision, fear and perseverance as Collins weaves together a few plotlines, a little mystery, a love story, and hope.
Collins writes from the heart, having suffered her own losses; writing Comfort in the Wings was her way of surviving. Cleverly, she doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, and readers will close the book, hoping that she will write a sequel — for Larissa and Stephen, Eric and Everett.
