
The Invention of Wings
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Jenna Lamia
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Adepero Oduye
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Sue Monk Kidd
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By:
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Sue Monk Kidd
About this listen
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world - and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.
©2014 Sue Monk Kidd (P)2014 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Critic reviews
“A remarkable novel that heightened my sense of what it meant to be a woman - slave or free... a conversation changer.” (Oprah Winfrey, O, The Oprah Magazine)
“Exhilarating...powerful...By humanizing these formidable women, The Invention of Wings furthers our essential understanding of what has happened among us as Americans - and why it still matters.” (The Washington Post)
“A textured masterpiece, quietly yet powerfully poking our consciences and our consciousness... leaves us feeling uplifted and hopeful.” (NPR)
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Laughter and tears
- By Lisa on 11-21-09
By: Sue Monk Kidd, and others
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Writing Creativity and Soul
- By: Sue Monk Kidd
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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When Sue Monk Kidd was in high school, a home economics teacher wrote a list of potential occupations for women on the blackboard: teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary. “Writer” was nowhere to be found. On that day, Kidd shut the door on her writerly aspirations and would not revisit the topic until many years later when she announced to her husband and two children that she was going to become a writer. And so began her journey into the mysteries and methods of the writerly life.
By: Sue Monk Kidd
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The Light Between Oceans
- A Novel
- By: M. L. Stedman
- Narrated by: Noah Taylor
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1918, after four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes only four times a year and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Three years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel is tending the grave of her newly lost infant when she hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up on shore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
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Wonderful story.....terrible narrator.
- By Sandra on 08-14-12
By: M. L. Stedman
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The Atomic Weight of Love
- By: Elizabeth J. Church
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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For Meridian Wallace - and many other smart, driven women of the 1940s - being ambitious meant being an outlier. Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother's sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn't expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he's recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him.
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Unbearable weight of self-pity
- By Lori K. on 04-08-17
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The Secret Wife
- By: Gill Paul
- Narrated by: Laura Kirman, Thomas Judd
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The stories of two very different women, linked by the secrets and lies of history, merge together as past and present weave together in this stunning story of love, loss and resilience. 2016. Kitty, fleeing from a devastating revelation in her own life, finds herself at her great-grandfather's cabin in Lake Akanabee. There she discovers a gorgeous necklace, which leads her uncover to long-buried family secret. 1914. Tatiana, Grand Princess of Russia, falls in love with Dmitri, a Russian solider, as she nurses him back to health.
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An unexpected jewel with refreshing perspectives
- By Amazon Customer on 12-17-16
By: Gill Paul
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The Grimkes
- The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
- By: Kerri K. Greenidge
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand abolitionists in the North. Yet the focus on their story has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives, the progeny of their brother, Henry, and one of the enslaved people he owned, a woman named Nancy Weston.
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Before you read The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd read The Grimkes first.
- By Sherri Harris on 01-03-23
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The Wedding Gift
- A Novel
- By: Marlen Suyapa Bodden
- Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, January LaVoy
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa’s hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen’s daughter and Clarissa’s sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa’s husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once-powerful family.
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I was up past 4 a.m. listening to this book!
- By Cynthia on 05-18-14
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Jewel
- By: Bret Lott
- Narrated by: Celia Weston
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
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When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass. In this story of a woman's devotion to the child who is both her burden and God's singular way of smiling on her, Bret Lott has created a mother-daughter relationship of matchless intensity and beauty, and one of the finest, most indomitable heroines in contemporary American fiction.
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Unnesesary & overuse of the phrase 'Nigga Women'
- By Ashley N. Wilkins on 04-18-18
By: Bret Lott
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Orphan Train
- A Novel
- By: Christina Baker Kline
- Narrated by: Jessica Almasy, Suzanne Toren
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to "aging out" out of the foster care system. A community-service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse.... As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren’t as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds of other children whose destinies would be determined by luck and chance.
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Moving story of sharing and transformation.
- By Kathi on 04-03-13
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The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Navabi
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. As a son, she can attend school, go to the market, and chaperone her older sisters. But Rahima is not the first in her family to adopt this unusual custom. A century earlier, her great-great grandmother, Shekiba, left orphaned by an epidemic, saved herself and built a new life the same way.
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Amazing Afghan women
- By Chiquis35 on 05-26-25
By: Nadia Hashimi
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
- By: Ayana Mathis
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo, Bahni Turpin, Adam Lazarre-White
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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A debut of extraordinary distinction: through the trials of one unforgettable family, Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration, a story of love and bitterness and the promise of a new America. In 1923, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.
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Hattie and her Family Tragically Flawed
- By Suzn F on 12-14-12
By: Ayana Mathis
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City of Girls
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance.
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A strong story
- By Anita Kristensen on 06-08-19
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American Dirt
- A Novel
- By: Jeanine Cummins
- Narrated by: Yareli Arizmendi
- Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier, the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city, is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.
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Completely unrealistic
- By Marlene L Marquez on 02-12-20
By: Jeanine Cummins
The second voice - "Handful" or Hettie, the 9 year old slave girl who is given to Sarah for her 11th birthday present. The book follows both girls... for 35 years... as Hettie's mostly fictional life is stitched alongside Sarah's mostly factual life. The two voices compare and contrast in a patchwork I found beautiful.
The audio is really good, but I have to tell you after listening to "The Help" so many times Jenna's voice would occasionally break the spell and I would see "Skeeter" in my mind instead of Sarah.
At the end Sue Monk Kidd explains her research, what parts are historically accurate and where she has taken liberties... made it even more meaningful. A life quilt is pieced during the book by Hettie's mother, but I can picture the book itself as a quilted story... of reaching, losing, dreaming and becoming.
Historical Fiction - beautifully quilted!
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A very compassionate person, I had watched Roots and, later listened to it on Audible. I concluded that every child should have Roots as a requirement in middle school. Then I both read and listened to The Help. Recognizing the time was set around the 50’s, when I was a teenager, I remembered a time when my grandmother took me on a trip on a Greyhound bus, and noticed the dark-skinned people sitting in the back of the bus. I was neither surprised nor indignant; that’s just the way it was. Also, neither did I feel surprise when the male employees made more than the females because “they had families to provide for”. I never questioned that or the off-color "jokes" they told.
I never thought about a man picking up ANYTHING after himself until Phil Donohue talked about how he picked up his socks after himself, and did not leave them for his wife to do. That was the beginning of my conscientiousness about female inequality.
I have watched the entire cycle of enlightenment about the male/female roles, and much of the dark skin/light skin roles change over the last 60+ years. I got most of my education from TV as I Spy was the first series that featured a black male in a co-starring role. That was back when a dark skinned person could not even touch the hand, arm, etc of any white female on TV, let alone look at her lasciviously. No, darlings, that was not back in the 1800’s, but was just when I was married with young children, in the 60’s, after quitting my 3rd year in college because I got married, knowing it was what society expected of me, pre-dating my wedding day after my boyfriend and I got married in secret, and before I started to “show”.
I watched as TV ads morphed from the “he” ads (What will the doctor say when he sees your son’s leg?” to “What will your doctor say when she sees your daughter‘s leg?”) Within a few short years or decades this kind of advertising has, in my opinion, made the white male the most handicapped of all the sexes and races. Within the last 3-4 years I have heard my 3 grandsons (from 3 different families and areas) remark that girls were smarter than boys! (Oh, the pendulum swings.)
Now, I am a hard working great-grandma working with hundreds of dark skinned emigrants, trying to make life a bit simpler/easier for them. I love the path my life has taken, due, in most part to the conscience-raising in my life from many sources.
Therefore, I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart, Ms. Kidd, for researching and writing about these 3 wonderful Southern women who were ready to give their life or make it their life’s work to somehow make it better for thousands, millions of unborn people that they could never have envisioned. It makes me weep for all the unfortunates “out there” who actually have given their very lifeblood, and who still do, come to think it, many times on a global theatre.
This is a Masterpiece, and should be required reading for all middle school children!
A Masterpiece!
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Soul Touching
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BREAKING THE SHACKLES THAT BIND A WOMAN
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Good blending of history and fiction
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I LOVED this book !
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What made the experience of listening to The Invention of Wings the most enjoyable?
Just finished The Invention of Wings: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd (author of The Secret Life of Bees). I LOVED this book and what a great read during Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday weekend! I have enjoyed Ms. Kidd's writing for over thirty years ....she first wrote short articles in Guideposts, moved on to wonderful books on spirituality and feminism and then to novels. This novel is based on two real women, the Grimke sisters. After having been raised in Charleston in a family of fourteen children, the sisters developed their anti-slavery views and became Quakers and active members of the abolitionist movement in the early part of the 19th century. Ms. Kidd adds a carefully crafted character who is a young woman owned by the Grimke family and that storyline interspersed with the real-life sisters produces powerful storytelling. Having been raised a Quaker, I particularly enjoyed visits with Lucretia Mott and discussions on John Woolman as integral parts of the story. Buy a copy, download it to your Kindle, or listen to it as an audiobook as I did and I think you'll be profoundly moved.Great Novel to read over MLK, Jr. Weekend!
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Author writes with deep empathy!
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The novel kept me totally engaged at every level, and I came to love, admire, respect, and root for Sarah, Charlotte, Nina, Handful, and Sky.
I really didn't want it to end, but author's note at end helped... meticulously researched.
Recommend to anyone who enjoys great historical novels about real people.
Amazing, illuminating historical novel
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I loved this book! Narration was stellar as well!
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