American Ace is a graceful, buoyant novel in short verse by the award-winning Marilyn Nelson (How I Discovered Poetry; A Wreath for Emmett Till). Sixteen-year-old Connor Bianchini is from a big, warm, Irish-Italian family. But when his Italian grandmother, Nonna Lucia, dies, Connor's father "went weird," spending joyless nights in front of the TV drinking Chianti. Connor is worried: "I googled depression. And I got scared./ A blue glacier was growing between us."
Connor's dad finally "breaks the bubble" at a family feast. When Nonna died, she left her son "a ring, a pilot's wings, and a letter," and with them, a life-changing family secret: the man he called Dad was not his biological father. His father was an American nicknamed Ace. Connor ponders: "One quarter of me was American:/ Did that take me back to the Mayflower? The ancestors I knew were innocent/ of the white guilt of Indian slayers/ and slave owners. Did this new grandfather/ connect me differently to history?"
In the months that follow, Connor and his father work first to unravel the mystery of the birth father's identity, and then to come to grips with their own sense of identity when their research reveals that the mystery man was a Tuskegee Airman, an African American pilot who fought discrimination at home in order to be allowed to fight on the European front in World War II. Nelson's exquisite free verse follows Connor as he begins to examine his own notions of heredity, race, family and the lenses through which one views the world. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor