By confronting the past, Adrien learns to understand and accept the present. The spirits were moaning, a low sound that seemed to be calling the storm toward the beach where Adrien came to a halt, pushing to stay erect in the wind. She was sure the spirits were calling something specific— short phrase, several words, repeated like the lightning that snaked in the sky. Another sheer burst of white and Adrien stepped forward into the wild lake, the call of the spirit girls, the energy of their brains dying across the sky. Into some understood sameness. Having barely survived a brain aneurysm two years earlier, fifteen-year-old Adrien, working at her Aunt Erin's summer camp, is caught between the land of the living and the spirit world, unsure where she belongs. As she struggles to understand the message delivered by the spirits of the five young women that only she sees, she learns of the tragic consequences of their connection to her aunt. Faced with the knowledge that another aneurysm could strike her at any time and mostly shunned by the other staff because she is the boss's niece, Adrien finds a soulmate in Paul, the camp handyman, who is convinced that he has seen his own death foretold. Before Wings is an ambitious, beautifully written novel that dares to explore territory seldom tackled in teen fiction. In Adrien, author Beth Goobie has created a memorable character - intelligent, strong, irreverent, stubborn, funny, independent, fragile - who learns to confront the reality of her own death and to "believe in life."