Wings of a Dream by Anne Mateer
Rebekah plans on leaving the farm life for the big city with Arthur once the Great War ended. In the meantime, she heads to Texas to take care of her aunt, who’s been struck with the Spanish flu. It doesn’t hurt that Arthur is in Dallas training to fly planes. When she arrives in Prater Junction, Texas, she discovers not just a sick aunt but four practically orphaned children under her aunt’s care. And, of course, a farm.
She didn’t plan on falling in love with these children, but when she does, she second-guesses the big things she thought God had for her.
Wings of a Dream by Anne Mateer draws you into a world where the smell of gasoline from the newfangled automobiles mixes with horse manure, where women churn butter while praying for the pilots overseas. While the development depends too much on questions (which can be repetitive), Mateer’s prose is rich with metaphors like “stifling as a wool blanket on a summer day” or laughter that “mingled together like honey in hot tea,” metaphors which enrich and fill out her character, not to mention give the reader a treat.
But the best part was recognizing my story in Rebekah’s: a woman who dreams big but has to learn how to trust God. She wants “to do something important…Something big. Something lasting.” When she reveals this to another character, he confronts her with a different perspective. “I think tending my farm and raising my children are the most worthwhile things I can do.”
This perspective confronts many of us when our desire to live meaningful lives gets lost, maybe not in a sprawling farm, but in ostinato suburbs. This is the true beauty of Mateer’s story, bringing us all face to face with this question about trusting God with our dreams and caring for the ones he’s placed in our lives. Perhaps, like Rebekah, we can learn to pursue the insignificant and the ordinary with as much passion as the big and magnificent.
