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Flight: A Novel
by Sherman Alexie
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780802170378 |
Only 3 left in stock at $8.95!
Powells.com Staff Pick
Darkly funny, sharply observant, Flight lays bare the experience of a teenaged outsider circa 2007. Alternately heartbreaking and wondrous, Sherman Alexie's first novel in ten years tells the story of an orphan careening through foster homes until finally, not long after we meet him, he walks into a bank and comes unstuck in time. Gritty, intense, and especially timely, it's a lightning-fast read besides.
Recommended by Dave, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
Sherman Alexie is one of our most gifted and accomplished storytellers and a treasured writer of huge national stature. His first novel since Indian Killer is a powerful, fast, and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a legal Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror.
The journey for this young hero begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of decision, he finds himself shot back through time and resurfaced in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era. Here he will be forced to see just why Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s. Red River is only the first stop in a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He will continue traveling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these frantic trips through time, his refrain grows: Who's to judge? and I don't understand humans. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he's seen.
This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while he's breaking our hearts. Time Out has said that "Alexie, like his characters, is on a modern-day vision quest," and this has never been clearer than in Flight, where he seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and groundbreaking Alexie.
Review:
"A deadpan 'Call Me Zits' opens the first novel in 10 years from Alexie (Smoke Signals, etc.), narrated by a self-described 'time-traveling mass murderer' whose name and deeds unravel as this captivating bildungsroman progresses. Half-Indian, half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was 10 (after he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several people and is shot dead himself. Zits then commences time-traveling via the bodies of others, finding himself variously lodged in an FBI agent in the '70s (helping to assassinate radical Indian activists); a mute Indian boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn; an Indian tracker named Gus; an airplane pilot instructor (one of whose pupils commits a terrorist act); and his own father. Zits eventually comes back to himself and to an unexpected redemption. While the plot is wisp-thin, one quickly surrenders to Zits's voice, which elegantly mixes free-floating young adult cynicism with a charged, idiosyncratic view of American history. Alexie plunges the book into bracing depths." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"A funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious voice set beside his elder...contemporaries....Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth." Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
Review:
"I won't spoil the ending. It is so unexpected, yet earned and deserved. But I will tell you, right here in the pages of a public newspaper, that I cried at the end." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review:
"Whatever [Flight] is — literary exercise, rapid-fire monologue, adolescent vision quest — it is nevertheless an often thrilling and surprising ride, and wholly Alexie." Village Voice
Review:
"Alexie's concentrated and mesmerizing novel of instructive confrontations is structured around provocative variations on the meanings and implications of flight as it asserts that people of all backgrounds are equally capable of good and evil." Booklist
Review:
"Despite its conceits, Flight is the most unpretentious novel I've read in a long time. It's a narrative stripped to its core, all rage and heart... raw and vital, often raucously funny, and there isn't a false word in it." Tom Barbash, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis:
The best-selling author of multiple award-winning books returns with his first novel in ten years, a powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while breaking our hearts. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and again, groundbreaking Alexie.
About the Author
Sherman Alexie is the author of Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, The Toughest Indian in the World, and Ten Little Indians. He wrote and directed The Business of Fancydancing and also wrote the award-winning screenplay for Smoke Signals, a film based on his short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 19 comments:
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RPalladino, March 31, 2008 (view all comments by RPalladino)
Zits is an Irish Indian teenager who feels very out of place in the world. He has no parental figures because his father left him on the day he was born, and his mother died at an early age. He feels lost and vulnerable with few or no friends and no parents, which is why he is a very angry person and hard to deal with.
Zits has lived in way too many foster homes, and he has gotten in trouble with the police so many times that he has made friends with some of them. He made friends with a boy named Justice who convinced him to do a ghost dance to bring back his father and mother, which led him to shooting people in a bank. When he gets shot himself he makes a journey through time living in other people’s bodies and learning valuable lessons.
Flight is a very easy book to read and it helps teenagers who feel out of place understand that they are somebody, and that they do belong someplace in the world.
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MPalladino, March 31, 2008 (view all comments by MPalladino)
Zits is a confused teen whose father left when he was born, and mother died when he was very young. Trying to find himself and trying to figure out if he is worth anything to anyone, he travels to many foster families without finding one that seems to fit. Being Irish and Indian he has a unique ancestry.
Eventually Zits becomes friends with a boy named Justice who convinces him to do the Ghost Dance to bring back his mother and father. So Zits walks into a bank with a paint ball gun and a real gun and begins to shoot. Then he is shot in the head and falls into darkness.
Suddenly Zits is not himself. He is another man in another time. Every time Zits closes his eyes he is catapulted to another story, and is eventually brought back to his own body and mind so he can relive that moment in the bank.
This story full of revenge and valuable lessons is interesting and easy to read. I would recommend it to anyone so people can understand how people like Zits feel, and so people like Zits can realize that they are worth something.
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KCole10, March 31, 2008 (view all comments by KCole10)
Flight is a very enjoyable read. The quick pace provides for low stress reading and allows for the book to be finished rather quickly. Although this trait can be criticized as "simple", I appreciate this fact as it makes the book easier to enjoy. It is a nice change of pace from the other novels my Honors English class has read this year which are dominated by complex writing structures.
There is a lot of action in the book which is also very appealing. The novel literally "flies" by as the main character, Zits, jumps back and forth in history experiencing different events. The frequent and sudden changes in scenery leave no time for dull moments in the story.
Most likely taking away from Flight's "literary value" is the overtness of its themes. While this does not bother me at all, the novel does not leave room for much speculation from the reader as ideas are quite obviously explained in the reading.
Due to its main character, Zits, Flight is a very appealing novel for teenagers. While representing a very extreme case of adolescent anger, Zits' issues can be appreciated by most young adults. It also doesn't hurt that Zits is a very humourous individual.
View all 19 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780802170378
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Grove Press, Black Cat
- Author:
- Author:
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Indians of north america
- Subject:
- Foster children
- Subject:
- Native American Studies
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Publication Date:
- March 28, 2007
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 181
- Dimensions:
- 8.42x5.52x.56 in. .53 lbs.
