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When Elephants Fly by Nancy Richardson Fischer

September 2018

T. Lily Decker is a high school senior with a 12-year plan: avoid stress, drugs, alcohol and boyfriends, and take regular psych quizzes administered by her best friend to make sure she’s not developing schizophrenia. When she was seven, her mother, who had paranoid schizophrenia, tried to kill her. And a secret has revealed that Lily’s odds are even worse than she thought. But when a newspaper internship results in Lily witnessing a mother elephant try to kill her three-week-old calf, Swifty, Lily can’t abandon the story or the calf. With Swifty in danger of dying from grief, Lily must choose whether to risk everything --- including her sanity and a first love --- on a desperate road trip to save the calf’s life.