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Flight |
Sherman Alexie’s first novel in ten years is the hilarious and tragic portrait of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity.
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
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.
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Reviews
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Native Son
by Tom Barbash
May 27, 2007
The New York Times
Time-Traveling Lessons for a Teenager on the Verge
by S. Kirk Walsh
April 25, 2007
Washington Post
Time-traveling Boy - A Native American orphan finds a way to escape his misery.
by Ann Cummins
April 15, 2007
The Austen Chronicle
Readings - Flight by Sherman Alexie
By John Razook
April 6, 2007
Time Out New York
The metamorphoses - Sherman Alexie delivers a new novel about a shape-shifting American Indian.
by Rod Smith
March 29, 2007
The Village Voice
A Boy's Life, Zits and All Sherman Alexie's young hero sets off on a journey across time and race
by Anderson Teppe
March 15, 2007
Spokane7.com
Alexie's new novel takes off
by Daniel Webster
March 9, 2007
Ward Six
Sherman Alexie vs. Neutral Milk Hotel
by J. Robert Lennon
February 27, 2007
Booklist
It's tough enough to be an orphan and a ward of the state, let alone a so-called
half-breed. Heck, being 15 years old is no freaking picnic, especially if your
face is so badly marred by acne your nickname is Zits. Add to that a devastating
history of abuse, and no wonder Zits, a gun in each hand, is about to exact
revenge on strangers in a bank. Has Alexie, a high-profile writer known for
provocative, inventive, in-your-face fiction about Native American life, written
a classic troubled youth-turned-killer tale? Of course not. This is a
time-travel fable about the legacy of prejudice and pain. Zits is inexplicably
catapulted back to 1975, where he inhabits the body of a white FBI agent
confronting radical Indian activists, the first episode in an out-of-body
odyssey. Smart, funny, and resilient, Zits is profoundly transformed, as the
hero in a tale of ordeals is supposed to be, by his shape-shifting experiences
as an Indian boy at Little Big Horn, an Indian tracker, a homeless Indian drunk,
and a pilot in unnerving proximity to a Muslim terrorist. 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. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Publishers Weekly
Flight
Sherman Alexie. Grove/Black Cat, $13 paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-8921-7037-8
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. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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