Adele Pietra's destiny is carved in the same brilliantly hued granite her father and brother cleave from the Stony Creek mine until her brother, Charles, dies in a mining accident. Seeing a chance to escape her provincial Connecticut town, Adele assumes his identity—hair chopped and chest bound—and enrolls at Yale.

To her own surprise, she falls in naturally with a lively crew of undergraduates. As Adele begins to confront her class and ethnicity as never before, though, she fears that both her crush on her lanky, charismatic friend Wick and her mother's well-meaning interventions will expose her delicate masquerade.

One part social history, one part coming-of-age tale, On Borrowed Wings is an impeccably researched first novel that transports us to 1930s Yale through the eyes of an appealing but unlikely narrator.