Children's Literature: What price should we be willing to pay for a rare, extraordinary gift? What if that gift is made possible only by the possession of a body regarded by others as disfigured, distorted, and defective? When is difference from others a curse, and when is it a blessing? Fifteen-year-old foster-child David has a short face, bug eyes, a stooped back, painfully sensitive hearing, and wings. Doctors call his condition ?Ichthyosis vulgaris? –which he knows has ?something to do with birdlike and ugly?–but they cannot know the strange joy he feels as he swoops down off a high cliff in the night like a soaring angel. When David is sent to Oak Leaf Alternative School, for the first time he encounters other young people who, like him, have ?a story,? including epilectic Cheetah, with whom he falls in love. Then David is confronted with a choice: Should he have reconstructive surgery that will turn him into conventionally handsome ?New Guy? and clip his wings forever? The resolution of the story is somewhat predictable–would anyone publish a young adult novel that encouraged teens to alter themselves surgically to become more like everyone else? One might wish that Weaver had allowed David to entertain a less all-or-nothing choice: couldn?t some of his grotesque facial features be corrected without robbing him of the gift of flight? Weaver?s unusual and compelling novel raises profound and important philosophical questions that should be of intense interest to any reader who has pondered the price of conformity. Reviewer: Claudia Mills, Ph.D.