Enormous Wings

• Author: Laurie Frankel
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publication Date: May 5, 2026
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

From the beloved New York Times bestselling author Laurie Frankel, an exuberant and timely new novel.

At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. Her children and grandchildren worry it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: she’s pregnant.

Once word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and the paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, all descending on Vista View as Pepper tries to determine her next move. Soon Pepper has some hard decisions to make—and some she’s not allowed to make.

Enormous Wings is an urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about what happens when you don’t get to choose. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks—even so late in the day—can still change, and then change everything.

A former coworker introduced me to Laurie Frankel by handing me a copy of This Is How It Always Is, and I was hooked on her writing immediately. Each of her books that I’ve read leads me further into fan territory, and I love her ability to effortlessly capture family dynamics and explore the bonds of various types of families. I was thrilled to check out this book and only partly because of how unique the story sounded. 

Frankel didn’t let me down at all, which was not a surprise. I quickly fell in love with everything about this story, and found a lot of identification that I wasn’t expecting to find in these pages. The story is funny, and smart, and engrossing, yet still explores a range of heavier themes sensitively. I don’t come across a bevy of books that feature an elderly character as the narrator and protagonist, so I was intrigued to get to know Pepper.

A sassy, intelligent, and sharp older woman, it wasn’t hard for me to fall in love with Pepper. She’s a former English teacher and her love of books and reading shines through, in a nod to a Gabriel Garcia Marquez title abbreviated for this title. But her trouble begins when she has a car accident and the grouchy priest tears her license up. And it snowballs from there—her children find out and decide it is time for her to give up her license, and if she can’t drive, she doesn’t need a car, which turns into her house being sold and landing in a retirement community. If all that wasn’t bad enough, it’s the same old folk’s home that her ex-husband lives at. 

One of the things that I really liked most about Pepper was the way she could apply a rational approach to her thinking, even in the most irrational situations. So her first step was to keep an open mind and make the best of her situation, recalling that she is doing this out of love for her children. She finds herself making friends that she wasn’t expecting to make, and even found some romance. I love that Pepper actively fights against the stigma of romance and sexual attraction between elderly people, and finds herself a partner in crime in Moth (short for Timothy), a feisty and kind British man. 

Pepper’s loss of autonomy occurs quickly, like an avalanche rolling down a mountain. She finds differing responses from her loved ones—her children, grandchildren, friends, ex-husband, and even the mouthy pastor whose truck she hit—to her ability to drive and live independently. Yet it feels like the only voice who isn’t being heard is Pepper’s own. This only grows when she suddenly begins experiencing some concerning symptoms: nausea, fatigue, confusion, and she’s brought to a hospital for a complete workup. Shockingly, Pepper finds herself pregnant. In Texas.

That loss of autonomy goes even further once Pepper discovers that she doesn’t have a say over her own body, simply because she lives in a state that bans abortion. Her options are extremely limited, although she does at least have resources and support from those around her. However, as her secret gets out, she’s hounded by a mob of reporters and paparazzi, trying to get photos and sound bites. It leads her to a place where her own independence is further curtailed, and she becomes isolated rather than having to deal with the vultures, even as the story goes wide and more people have their own, often forceful opinions on Pepper and her pregnancy. 

Themes of autonomy run through the story—bodily autonomy and personal independence are both impacted. The way the family dynamics are portrayed felt so realistic. As parents age, adult children find themselves sandwiched between their parents and their own children. And it inevitably leads to a feeling that you are parenting your own parent, which is a really uncomfortable place to be for everyone involved. I’ve been in that place recently, and I could tell that this book would hit home for both my mother and me. I’ve already told her that she and my aunt should read it.

I received an audiobook ARC, narrated by Becky Ann Baker, who did an outstanding job with Pepper and the other characters. Additionally, she was able to convincingly narrate a range of accents and tones, making this even more enjoyable. I found Pepper, Moth, and all the other characters to be adorably endearing, even her ex-husband Roger. 

Overall, this was a fantastic book about the family we are born into and the family we make for ourselves. The themes of both personal and bodily autonomy are not ones that we often see portrayed together, even in books with older narrators, simply because being pregnant and elderly are mutually exclusive. The layers of dynamics between all the characters, combined with the heavy themes of unintended pregnancy and limitation of personal freedoms made this a surprisingly deep read despite all the sarcasm, snark, wit, and humor on display. Much like the central cast of characters who reside at the Vista View Retirement Community, there was knowledge, wisdom, love, affection, warmth, and grief in abundance. And it’s a story about how far we would go for the people we love, much like her other books.

Bottom line: Don’t miss this warm, funny, and completely unique book with a main character you can’t help but love and a story you can’t stop reading.

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