On Borrowed Wings

March 12, 2007
In Prasad's touching first novel, Adele Pietra, a poor girl from a Connecticut granite quarry town in the 1930s, becomes a pioneer at Yale—disguised as her brother. Adele grows up in a town where the working-class residents never mix with the upper-crust vacationers. Except, that is, for Adele's parents; her mother was cut off by her wealthy family after she married a dashing Italian stonecutter. After a quarry accident kills Adele's father and her brother, Charles, Adele impersonates Charles and attends Yale in his place. At Yale, she makes friends with a stereotypically bookish, money-minded boy from Manhattan and handsome WASP Wick, who presents the greatest temptation to shed her assumed masculinity. The polarity of her upbringing adds meaning to an unexpected twist: Adele's work-study job is to assist a bigoted professor conducting a crooked study aimed at proving the rabble is intellectually inferior to the upper classes. Prasad has obviously done a great deal of research for this novel, and while some of it is integrated clumsily, she captures the excitement and strangeness of beginning college. Transcending the sometimes labored period setting—and wisely taking for granted the strictures of society that make Adele's charade necessary—Prasad renders believable a girl who becomes herself in a most unlikely way.