LoveReading Says
To tell an intimate, multi-themed tale of modern America in little over 200 pages is quite something, and that’s exactly what Lynn Steger Strong has done with Flight. Exploring loss, motherhood, marriage, and the weariness, frustration and anger that can come in the wake of feeling a chasm between hopes, actuality and responsibility, this wears its fierce power in readable style.
Henry, Kate and Martin are about to experience their first Christmas since losing their mother. Alongside tension around the “what are we going to do with Mom’s house?” question, day-to-day strains snag as the siblings and their spouses struggle to get on through their very different ways of doing things, not least when it comes to parenting, and their different financial statuses.
Electric with flaws, the characters feel incredibly real, not least because their words ring with authentic frustrations. Add to this sharply observed scenes of family life, a desperate race-against-time to help a local family, and the siblings’ smouldering grief, and Flight’s potency gathers to a stirring crescendo.
Reviewed by Joanne OwenJoanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen About Flight
It's 22 December and siblings Henry, Kate and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is their first Christmas since their mother passed. Without her once ever-present advice and gentle nudges to connect with each other when they need it most, they've grown distant.
Read the full description
Find This Book In
Flight Synopsis
It's 22 December and siblings Henry, Kate and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is their first Christmas since their mother passed. Without her once ever-present advice and gentle nudges to connect with each other when they need it most, they've grown distant.
Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals while also trying to decide what to do with their sole inheritance, their mother's house.
As each tries and fails and tries again to figure out how to reconcile their various needs and impulses around the house, they must also see whether they can and will remain a family without their matriarch. They are all feeling the strain but when a local child goes missing they are forced to come together, and all of them will cross a line.
About This Edition
Lynn Steger Strong Press Reviews
'Lynn Steger Strong is a master of family life, a wise chronicler of economic struggles real and imagined, of dreams versus responsibilities, and of nuances in relationships of all kinds. Arresting and powerful, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats' Lily King, author of Writers and Lovers
'A fateful few days in the life of two families becomes in Lynn Steger Strong's hands a clear-eyed examination of our current moment. Flight probes deeply into grief and its aftershocks, what binds us to one another, the meaning of art itself. It's a book whose fleet movements belie its ambition. Suspenseful, dazzling and moving' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
'A gorgeous novel, both intimate and expansive. Flight is packed full of wisdom about family, marriage, class, climate, love and loss. Lynn Steger Strong is a master of creating characters so funny, flawed and true that they feel like people you know. I couldn't put it down' J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Friends and Strangers
'Breathtakingly propulsive and insightful, Flight gripped me from the very first page and didn't let go. It asked my heart to pay better, closer attention to the world, because it pays such exquisite attention to the world: from botched gingerbread houses to cigarette breaks, every scene bristles and pulses with nuance. Strong is a writer who makes me feel reconfigured, more sharply attuned to the business of being alive; as if I have nerve endings that didn't exist before reading her. Flight is a story about how we lose and find each other again - and how this finding is never done, because we are, all of us, many selves at once' Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and Make it Scream, Make it Burn
'With razor-sharp pacing and luminous prose, Lynn Steger Strong aims her keen eye on the complexities of siblings, marriage, motherhood and grief. Flight is a wonderfully alive look at the ways we try - defiantly and sometimes perilously - to love one another. You will want to gulp this book down in one sitting, but I urge you to slow down because its charms should be savored'
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of Good Company
.jpg)
