Folding a Thousand Autumns into a Paper Plane

Folding the Ages into Paper Planes is a collection of short, fantastical campus stories about youth, using “paper planes” and “four-leaf clovers” as motifs to link ten heart-fluttering chapters set at summer’s end.

Shooting stars on the rooftop, chalk in the hallway, a lighthouse by the sea, a Braille board in the pouring rain, silhouettes among fields of flowers... Everyday life and strange wonders intertwine as the teenagers fold secret crushes, salvation, and growth into their wings, through a cycle of “making a wish, breaking a promise, and making a wish again.”

Grades, rainstorms, power outages, graduation: in the end, the two of them answer every riddle of youth together:

“Piece the four-petaled paper back together, join the two halves of a heart, and return the fallen fourth leaf to the three-leaf clover, ”

As the paper plane, bearing a painted four-leaf clover, flies toward the orange-red horizon, they finally learn to let their love take root, and to help each other take flight.