One ingredient most of us look for in a novel is plausibly lifelike fictional beings we're willing to spend some time among. While many of the characters in Ann Dávila Cardinal's new book We Need No Wings fail to make strong or lasting impressions, her protagonist, Tere Sanchez, is enchanting — good company indeed. Cardinal, who lives in Morrisville and earned her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a self-avowed "aging tattooed Gringa-Rican punk." Her previous books include the young-adult horror novel Five Midnights (2019), which won an AudioFile Earphones Award and an International Latino Book Award; and a sequel, Category Five (2020), an ILBA finalist. Her first adult novel, The Storyteller's Death (2022), was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award and winner of the popular fiction category of the ILBA. Her young-adult "horror rom-com" Breakup From Hell was published in 2023. As of last month, Cardinal has two new books: We Need No Wings and Hispanic Star: Bad Bunny. The latter, written for children with Claudia Romo Adelman, is a biography of the Puerto Rican rapper. In We Need No Wings, Tere is a Puerto Rican professor of American literature who lives in Vermont. On leave from teaching after her husband, Carl, suffered a fatal stroke, she is mired in grief, with "hours spent sitting in a chair staring off into space ... as if the silence of the empty house had weight, like a pile of cinder blocks that pressed down on her." Colleagues implore Tere to return to the classroom, and she's refreshed by the students' responses when she gives a guest lecture on magical realism. Yet Tere is unable to get back in motion. As a year passes, she risks losing her tenured position. Then a plot device sets off tectonic shifts: Tere suddenly and inexplicably levitates while watering a bed of peonies that her husband had planted and lovingly tended. The familiar electric heat of panic flooded her body in a wave, and suddenly she no longer felt weightless but rather unbalanced, out of control. She pinwheeled her arms and kicked her legs, but all this did was upend her in the air, until she was horizontal to the ground, frantically swimming with her limbs and getting nowhere. She held tight to the bright green hose, the only thing tethering her to the earth. Her stomach lurched, and she wondered…