Ella Majors, worn down by years of pediatric nursing, takes what she means to be a temporary job as caregiver to Marion Henderson, a frightened five-year-old with juvenile diabetes. The house sits beside a birds-of-prey sanctuary on the South Carolina coast, and Ella quickly understands that the child's illness is not the only sorrow in it.
Marion's father, Harris Henderson, is better with the injured hawks, owls and eagles he rehabilitates than he is with his own daughter. Around them move Lijah, an elderly man with a long attachment to the birds, and Brady, a teenager working off community service at the centre. As the birds come in broken and, sometimes, go back up, the household's own damage becomes harder to ignore.
Then Marion's mother comes back. Skyward is women's fiction in Monroe's characteristic Lowcountry register, using the real practice of raptor rehabilitation as its spine and paying close attention to the birds themselves. It is a quiet book about care, custody and the risk involved in letting anything fly free.
