All of Us with Wings

Overview

Michelle Ruiz Keil's debut novel follows Xochi, a seventeen-year-old Mexican-American girl who has washed up alone in San Francisco after fleeing a mother who left her and a man who used her trust against her. Survival has made her guarded, but her isolation breaks when she meets Pallas, a watchful twelve-year-old growing up in a rambling Victorian with her musician parents. Xochi is drawn into the household as a governess of sorts, absorbed by its unusual rhythms of loud shows downstairs and improvised tenderness upstairs.

The family operates outside conventional rules, built on openness and a loyalty that Xochi has never known. That fragile belonging is tested when she and Pallas, half in earnest and half in play, perform a ritual tied to riot grrrl music and the turning of the season. The rite does not stay harmless: it calls forward two beings bound by an old debt, tasked with settling accounts on Xochi's behalf whether she wants them to or not.

What follows braids coming-of-age realism with folklore, as Xochi is forced to reckon with the people who hurt her even as she tries to protect the makeshift family she has only just found. The novel moves between genres as easily as its characters move between the Victorian's floors, treating myth as a lens for processing trauma rather than an escape from it.

Context and Themes

Keil sets her story inside a specific, lovingly rendered subculture: the post-punk and riot grrrl scene of late-1980s San Francisco, with its DIY ethos, blurred domestic arrangements, and music as both community glue and personal armor. The book uses that backdrop to ask what "family" can mean when it is chosen rather than given, and it treats the household's free-love structure as a source of genuine safety for Xochi rather than a threat to it.

The fantasy elements function as a way of externalizing what abuse and abandonment leave behind. Rather than resolving Xochi's history through conversation or therapy alone, the novel gives her past a literal, mythic weight, embodied in the summoned avengers, forcing her to decide what justice she actually wants versus what has simply been done to her. That tension between vengeance and healing runs through the book's back half.

Reception has generally placed the novel among a wave of YA fantasy that folds serious subject matter, including sexual abuse and parental abandonment, into lyrical, genre-blending storytelling, and it is frequently discussed alongside other debuts that center queer and found-family households as their emotional core.

Why All of Us with Wings Has Been Challenged

The household Xochi joins is explicit about practicing free love, and the narrative treats that arrangement, along with the polyamorous and queer relationships within it, as a stable, caring environment rather than something to be corrected. Some challengers have objected to a young adult novel presenting non-traditional family and relationship structures without condemnation, arguing the book normalizes arrangements they consider inappropriate for teen readers.

The story's confrontation with Xochi's past, including the betrayal by a man who exploited her, brings sexual abuse directly into the text, and objectors have raised concerns about a young adult audience encountering that material, even though the narrative approaches it from the survivor's perspective rather than treating it as spectacle. The novel's mixing of ritual magic, sexuality, and revenge has also drawn scrutiny from those who view the combination as unsuitable for the intended teen readership, regardless of the thematic purpose it serves in the story. Records show this title has been challenged in 2 states and 2 districts tracked in this catalog.