Flying Home doesn’t soar quite so high as its predecessors, but the finished trilogy is a trip not to be missed.
This delightful omnibus volume includes three novels: the previously published Taking Off and On the Wing and the never before published Flying Home, which completes the adolescent adventure of Kraft’s serial alter ego character Peter Leroy—aka the “Bird Boy of Babbington.”
Flying Home revisits the 1950s, when Peter’s “flight” from Long Island to New Mexico via a home-made “aerocycle” (which, in truth, only “taxied” at virtual ground level) made him a local celebrity—and also shows him in the near-present, now in his 60s, resigned to tell the unromantic truth about his adventure. We’re also made privy to his youthful experiences at a most unconventional institution of, uh, higher learning: the Summer Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry (SIMPaW), a precariously dangling branch of the New Mexico Institute of Agriculture, Technology, and Pharmacy. This southwestern Arcadia is a breeding ground for miscellaneous young geniuses and crackpots, and a vehicle, some might say, for Kraft’s deadpan reworking of the imaginary discipline of “pataphysics” concocted by super-eccentric surrealist author Alfred Jarry. SIMPaW’s inspired simulations of applied science are nicely juxtaposed with Peter’s abovementioned later return home, accompanied by his unflappably cool and comforting spouse Albertine, as he scrambles for a palatable explanation of his “lies,” which may discourage Babbington from exploiting his local fame as the main attraction of a tourist-friendly theme park. As all Kraft’s novels do, this one meanders and repeats itself nearly ad nauseam. But the tomfoolery retains its power to charm, and Peter’s habit of “mental traveling” finally adds up to something like a Proustian exploration of the phenomenon of memory. Besides, there’s no resisting an author who, while effortlessly shifting gears and subjects, announces, “I apologize for this chapter.”
Flying Home doesn’t soar quite so high as its predecessors, but the finished trilogy is a trip not to be missed.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-42872-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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