"Most of them are located in church basements, and the people who assemble here are an extraordinary assortment of lost and found souls: thirtyish types like me, trying to start over; street people in rags who come in for free coffee and to escape the cold; corporate executives down to their last dime; artists, musicians, teachers, housewives, thieves, rich kids, gang kids, firefighters, lawyers, and actors whose faces you've seen on TV."
My public library's copy of Zachary's Wings had been checked out 8 times since its publication in 1998, for an average of 1.3 reads a year. Zachary's Wings gets the Soci Award for Best Social Work Novel about Addiction. Bravo, Rosemarie Robotham. We'll toast you at our next substance-consuming event.

Of the three novels I read for this article, Madchild Running by Keith Egawa was the story most fully grounded in the world of social work, primarily taking place within the confines of the social service agency that Levi, the main character, works for : The Urban Native Support Services, a social service agency for Native Americans in Seattle, Washington. Levi gets involved with all sorts of families that were immediately familiar to me. Also, the dilemmas that Levi comes up against, particularly the dilemmas around custody of children in abusive homes, were dilemmas that I ran up against (and continue to run up against) frequently in my work.

For a first novel, Egawa has written a book of great emotional strength. His prose carefully express the tenuous position of Levi as he straddles the issues of identity (Levi, like the author, is part Native American) both personal and professional. At one haunting moment in the book, Levi comes across a bag of valium in the possession of his 12-year-old-client, Nicki, a girl who looks like his younger sister, and who later gives him his Indian name, a critical step toward the development of his own Native American identity. Against his own better judgment, Levi promises not to tell anyone about the pills. "I had promised not to tell. What was I? I couldn't say I was a social worker. I was a lie, a mass of unavailing good intentions set afire by the things I had witnessed and the inability to answer my own questions. I felt that I had to get out soon, but I knew that I would not."

Levi is in too deep and can't tell why, until the flashbacks start — flashbacks to his own father's beatings of his mother — flashbacks that explain his misguided protectiveness for Nicki. Like the Indigo Girls sing, What would you give for your kid fears? Levi wants to give everything to protect Nicki from his "kid fears," his fears of abandonment and loss of his mother at the hands of his father's brutality. But in doing so, he loses perspective. He becomes a child again with Nicki, an impulse that I can at once recognize from my own experience as a social worker. Unfortunately, Levi is destined for the worst kind of punishment for his transgression.