Claire Belle is an eleven year-old girl with the uncanny ability to attract and understand birds.
She spends most of her free time away from school in the woods surrounding her rural home acquainting herself with the wildlife and avoiding other children.
She is considerably taller than most kids her age with snow-white hair and yellow-gold eyes, the color we're told, of the Great Horned Owl.
These are all physical traits that will make her a spectacular young woman, but mark her as different at an age when little girls want to fit in, not stand out.
Wild birds and her big sheepdog Sammy are her only friends when this story begins.
Claire avoids other children but her courage and fierce love of wild things makes her a formidable opponent when adults or children fail to meet her standards of justice.
In this first book of a planned trilogy, Claire squares off against a violent drunk and a confused adolescent pathologically obsessed with killing her favorite bird, a wild red-tailed hawk named Big Red.
She also begins to sense that being different can be empowering, and finds a friend to share secrets with--and, dare we think in a later book, affection? Much as Claire Belle protects her red-tailed friend, this book might be seen as an attempt by author Georgia Anne Butler to protect what must be her favorite wild thing, birds.
She does this by gently educating her readers as to their habits, habitats and appearance and by making them important characters in the plot's development.
By the books climax you find yourself so worried about Big Red you can't put the book down.
As you might realize at this point, Of The Wing: The Legend Awakes is a children's book.
Adults might enjoy it too; especially those adults who as children suffered being different.
You didn't have to grow up in the sticks to meet people like the young protagonist Claire Belle meets in her woods.
According to a line on the back cover it was written with ages 9 and up in mind.
I have no argument with that assessment (who decides these things, anyway?), and a young friend of mine had no problem with the vocabulary although he did have to check on a word or two (all the better).
He did have some questions about the relationships that I wasn't about to answer, but for the most part I found the book the right combination of violence, darkness, hope, wonder and promise.
I have to think any kid who reads this book and understands it will be the better for having done so.
Isn't that the unstated promise of every good children's book?