On the Wings of la Noche

by Vanessa L. Torres

In Vanessa L. Torres’s YA fantasy, a teenage lechuza—a supernatural owl shapeshifter who guides souls toward the afterlife—must navigate her responsibilities to the dead while grieving her girlfriend. Blending a queer coming-of-age story with Mexican folklore, the novel explores the difficult boundary between holding on to love and allowing life to continue.

Big Idea

Grief can make moving forward feel like betrayal, but continuing to live need not mean forgetting. The novel’s supernatural premise also invites readers to examine how writers use fantasy to make emotional conflicts tangible.

Discussion Questions

1.How does the protagonist’s responsibility for guiding the dead complicate her own experience of grief? Where do her personal desires and responsibilities come into conflict?
2.What does the lechuza’s ability to move between human and owl forms allow the novel to express about identity, belonging, or freedom?
3.How does the novel distinguish between preserving a connection with someone and being unable to let that person go?
4.How do the protagonist’s relationships influence her decisions? Which interactions challenge the way she understands herself?
5.Choose a moment when the narrative seems to accelerate or slow down. How does that pacing shape your understanding of love, loss, or responsibility?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes📦 Copies of the novel, a teacher-selected excerpt, paper, pencils, highlighters, a timer, and optional colored pencils or a shared digital document.

Learning Goals

Analyze how the protagonist’s supernatural responsibilities intensify her emotional conflict, using textual evidence.
Explain how scene, summary, sentence structure, and paragraph breaks influence narrative pace.
Write and revise a short scene to create contrasting effects of urgency and hesitation.
Discuss grief, queer identity, and folklore respectfully while distinguishing the novel’s imagined world from the diverse beliefs of real communities.

Activity Steps

1.Establish the context and discussion agreements (5 minutes): Review the lechuza’s role in the novel and the conflict between personal attachment and responsibility. Explain that students may use entirely invented situations and may choose a non-death-related departure scene.
2.Read and annotate a teacher-selected passage (10 minutes): Use a scene involving a supernatural responsibility, a transformation, or an emotionally difficult encounter. Mark action, reflection, dialogue, sensory details, and paragraph breaks; identify where reading seems to speed up or slow down.
3.Make a two-panel pacing map (5 minutes): Label one panel 'Urgency' and the other 'Hesitation.' Sketch the same threshold moment in each, adding notes about what the reader should notice and how long that moment should feel.
4.Draft two versions (15 minutes): Write approximately 100–150 words for each version. Keep the central event unchanged, but alter sentence lengths, selected details, dialogue, and the balance between action and thought.
5.Exchange and test (10 minutes): Partners read both versions silently or aloud, identify the most effective pacing change, and suggest one revision. Writers revise without assuming that short sentences must always be fast or long sentences must always be slow.
6.Reflect and connect (5 minutes): Students explain one revision and connect its effect to a specific moment in Torres’s novel, citing a page or chapter from their edition.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.7.1–RL.8.1, RL.9-10.1, RL.11-12.1 — Support literary analysis with relevant textual evidence.
ELA: CCSS RL.7.3–RL.8.3, RL.9-10.3 — Analyze interactions among character, events, setting, and the development of the narrative.
ELA: CCSS RL.9-10.5, RL.11-12.5 — Analyze how structural choices influence effects such as tension, surprise, and aesthetic impact.
ELA: CCSS W.7.3–W.8.3, W.9-10.3, W.11-12.3 — Develop narratives through effective technique, well-chosen details, and structured sequences.
ELA/SEL: CCSS SL.7.1–SL.8.1, SL.9-10.1, SL.11-12.1; social awareness and relationship skills — Participate thoughtfully in collaborative discussion and consider differing perspectives.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In On the Wings of la Noche, the movement between living and dead creates a powerful framework for studying narrative pace. The protagonist’s supernatural work requires movement and decisions, while grief can pull her attention toward memory, longing, and hesitation. Students can investigate how these competing demands shape the amount of narrative space a moment receives: which events pass quickly, which become fully developed scenes, and which feelings interrupt forward action. A Pace-Write-Read study treats those effects as craft choices rather than simply labeling passages 'fast' or 'slow.' With a teacher-selected excerpt, students can mark changes in sentence length, dialogue, sensory attention, reflection, and paragraphing, then test their interpretations through reading aloud. They should support observations with the actual text rather than presume that every transformation is fast or every memory is slow. The writing workshop then transfers observation into experimentation. Students keep one event constant while changing its delivery, discovering how pacing can communicate a conflict like the protagonist’s: the need to carry out a responsibility while wishing an emotionally significant moment would not end. For younger readers, use a short, preselected passage and concrete annotation categories; for older readers, extend the analysis to structure, ambiguity, and the relationship between supernatural and emotional stakes.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage centered on the lechuza’s responsibilities with one centered on grief for her girlfriend. Identify the textual choices that make time feel compressed, extended, or suspended.
2. Plot	Track how the protagonist’s choices connect her supernatural duties to her personal loss. Distinguish events that change the situation from passages that deepen the reader’s understanding of that situation.
3. Prosody	Read a short passage aloud twice, changing stress, intonation, and pauses. Discuss which reading best fits the protagonist’s emotional state and which features of Torres’s language support it.
4. Word	Compare the verbs used for physical movement with words describing attachment or grief. Test how replacing one precise word with a more general one changes intensity and pace.
5. Concept	Explore how a guide for the dead can also be someone who struggles with loss. Ask students how this central contradiction generates both external action and internal resistance.
6. Voice & Worldview	Notice how the narration frames death, love, and obligation rather than treating the supernatural premise as spectacle alone. Ask what attitudes emerge through diction and what those attitudes encourage readers to question.
7. Point of View	Identify the novel’s narrative perspective and its limits in the selected passage. Discuss how access to the protagonist’s perceptions shapes what readers understand about an encounter with the dead.
8. Setting & Place	Compare how a location is perceived during an ordinary interaction and during a supernatural or grief-centered moment. Track which spatial and sensory details influence the scene’s emotional pressure.
9. Original Characters	Study how the protagonist becomes more than her identity as a lechuza or a grieving girlfriend. Gather evidence of particular desires, habits, contradictions, and choices that make her distinctive.
10. Dialogue	Choose an exchange involving attachment, responsibility, or disagreement. Notice whether direct speech, interruptions, silence, or accompanying thoughts move the encounter forward or hold it in place.
11. Details	Identify a small detail that makes the protagonist’s loss or supernatural experience concrete. Discuss why that detail deserves narrative space and what would disappear emotionally if it were removed.
12. Descriptions	Examine a description of the protagonist’s body, surroundings, or supernatural perception. Ask whether it orients the reader, delays an outcome, deepens atmosphere, or accomplishes several purposes at once.
13. Firsts	Study the reader’s first introduction to the lechuza premise and to the protagonist’s grief. Notice how much Torres explains immediately and what questions remain open.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Find a moment that places readers close to a difficult decision or physical sensation. Identify how concrete action and selective access to thought make the conflict feel present rather than merely reported.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Label a passage’s fully dramatized scenes and its compressed accounts of time or experience. Discuss why an encounter related to the protagonist’s loss might receive more space than a stretch of routine activity.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate uncertainty about what will happen from concern about what a choice will cost emotionally. Investigate how the conflict between guiding souls onward and wanting continued connection can sustain both kinds of tension.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Track any memories, anticipatory statements, or unresolved endings students actually find in the text. Explain how each changes the reader’s experience of the protagonist’s present rather than assuming all three devices occur.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine several chapter endings for an unanswered question, an emotional reversal, or a consequential decision. Distinguish intentional chapter structure from page turns that vary across editions.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite a brief, student-created lechuza-inspired encounter at two speeds. Compare how each version changes the apparent importance of duty, fear, or attachment without changing the event itself.
20. Play	Invite students to experiment with human-scale and owl-scale perception in an invented scene. Use that contrast to explore how attention to distance, movement, and sound can change narrative speed.
21. Performance	Perform a selected exchange through a restrained reading and a more urgent reading. Require performers to justify pauses and emphasis using the scene’s language and emotional stakes, not theatrical effect alone.
22. Personality	Notice how the protagonist responds differently to emotional vulnerability and supernatural responsibility. Ask how her individual reactions influence the speed and direction of a scene.
23. Humor	If students identify humor, wit, or teasing, examine how it briefly changes the pressure surrounding grief. If an excerpt contains none, discuss how adding a joke might alter its tone and whether that alteration would serve the scene.
24. Pause	Find a silence, hesitation, or reflective beat near a consequential action. Discuss how the pause allows readers to feel the distance between what the protagonist must do and what she wants.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for imagery, figurative comparisons, and sound patterns connected to wings, night, love, or death. Analyze an actual example before deciding whether its effect is to intensify, slow, or link moments.
26. Repetition	Track a recurring word, image, or concern related to the protagonist’s loss or lechuza identity. Explain how its meaning changes with context rather than treating every recurrence as an identical effect.
27. Rhythm	Compare sentence patterns in an action-centered passage and an introspective one. Read them aloud to test how clauses, repeated structures, and sentence-length variation shape momentum.
28. Punctuation	Annotate the punctuation in a short passage of emotional strain. Try one alternative punctuation pattern and explain how it changes the protagonist’s apparent certainty, hesitation, or urgency.
29. Questions	Separate questions about the supernatural world from questions about what the protagonist should choose. Track which are answered promptly and which continue to propel the reader through the novel.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare the protagonist’s human and owl experiences or her public responsibilities and private wishes. Ask how alternating between contrasting states affects both pace and characterization.
31. Objects	Select an object that actually appears in a passage involving memory, connection, or duty. Analyze how attention to that object anchors emotion and whether it delays or motivates action.
32. Threes	Look for a genuine three-part sequence in actions, images, or sentence structure; do not assume one is present. As a writing experiment, build three escalating beats around an invented moment of departure.
33. Lists	Where the text accumulates details or thoughts, examine whether the accumulation creates abundance, overwhelm, or delay. Students can test the effect with a short list of what an owl-shaped observer notices in one instant.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect paragraph and section breaks around emotionally significant moments. Discuss how a break can ask readers to supply an unspoken response, and distinguish meaningful breaks from edition-specific layout.
35. Art & Graphics	If available, analyze the edition’s cover as a visual interpretation of the novel’s night, flight, and emotional themes. Treat it as paratext rather than evidence of interior illustrations, then design a symbolic pacing map for one scene.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Create a reader-made choice map of the protagonist’s competing responsibilities and attachments, supported by textual evidence. Use it to examine consequences rather than assigning points to grief or implying that the novel itself is interactive.
37. Placement	Investigate where Torres places an explanation, memory, or emotional realization relative to an action. Ask how moving that information earlier or later would change suspense and sympathy.
38. Form	Examine how the prose novel accommodates supernatural action, intimate relationships, and reflection. Rewrite a small moment as a poem or script to discover what the original narrative form makes possible.
39. Dummy	Use 'dummy' to mean a rough physical mock-up: fold paper into a six-panel booklet and storyboard a selected scene. Give each panel one narrative beat to test how the allocation of space changes the emphasis on action versus hesitation.
40. Passion	Identify what the protagonist cares about deeply enough to risk conflict or change. Connect that investment to craft by showing how a scene’s attention, detail, and duration reveal what matters most.

Pace-Write It!

Twenty-minute Pace-Write-It! task — 'One Departure, Two Speeds.' Minutes 0–3: Revisit a short, teacher-selected passage involving the protagonist’s lechuza responsibilities or grief for her girlfriend. Identify one action beat and one moment of emotional attention. Minutes 3–5: Plan an original scene in which a fictional guide must help a soul depart but hesitates because of an attachment; alternatively, write about helping a living friend leave a meaningful place. Minutes 5–10: Write a 75–100-word version emphasizing forward motion through selective detail, clear actions, and purposeful sentence patterns. Minutes 10–15: Rewrite the same event in 75–100 words, stretching one instant through perception, thought, silence, or paragraphing. Minutes 15–18: Exchange drafts; partners underline where each version changes their reading speed and explain why. Minutes 18–20: Revise one sentence and complete this reflection: 'Like the conflict between duty and attachment in On the Wings of la Noche, my scene uses ___ to make the reader experience ___.' No personal bereavement disclosure is required.

Classroom Activities

Between Two Worlds: A Scene in Two Speeds

Students create a two-panel pacing map and write two versions of an original threshold scene inspired by the novel’s tension between guiding a soul onward and wanting someone to stay. One version emphasizes urgent action; the other stretches a moment of emotional hesitation. Students compare how sentence structure, detail, dialogue, and paragraphing change the reader’s experience. Students may invent characters and should not be asked to disclose personal losses or reproduce culturally specific spiritual practices.

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