Interview with Anne Turner Coppola, author of Fly Away Free

Inside the Book:

Title: Fly Away Free 

Author: Anne Turner Coppola 

Publisher: Xlibris 

Genre: Juvenile Fiction 

Format: Ebook

The story begins when Tessie Farrell, an older woman living in South Florida, is walking her dog and rescues a baby osprey whose parents are killed by three young boys raiding the osprey’s nest to steal the baby ospreys. Taking the rescued baby osprey home, Tessie contacts the police to report what happened. After caring and feeding the baby osprey and building a cage for the bird, Tessie finds herself exhausted. Lying down to rest, Tessie is transported back in time, when she was a ten-year-old girl living with her parents on a dairy farm in northern New York. Devastated to learn that she is adopted, Tessie is taunted by her classmates as she struggles to understand why she was unwanted by her biological parents. In her isolation from children her own age, she creates her own fantasy world with the help of Dolly, a horse that is boarded at the farm and whom Tessie adopts as her pet horse, and two pet geese, raised and nurtured by Tessie as hatchlings. While Tessie roams her fantasy world with Dolly, she meets and befriends an older woman, Maudie, who will play a very important role in helping Tessie find herself as she learns to accept who she is and to find acceptance by those around her. This is a story of courage, self-discovery, and love, and a young girl’s struggle to overcome the pain of being adopted.

ORDER INFORMATION

Fly Away Free is available for order at

What is your favorite quality about yourself? As her husband of many years, I think I can say that her empathy for the ‘under dog,’ her sensitivity to the needs of others, and her persistence guided her in her writing

Who or what influenced your writing over the years? Can’t say, possibly me. I was also writing a book at the time for Doubleday

How did you come up with the title of the book? The title of the book is taken from a dramatic scene near the ending of the book, when the geese, fully grown, are leaving Tessie to join a flock of geese flying south to avoid the cold north country winter. As her mother and father console their heartbroken daughter, her dad says “Let them go, Tessie.“ “If you really love them, let them fly away free.”