Review by New York Times Review
FIFTEEN is a terrible age for a boy, especially a boy with no parents, a trail of abusive foster homes, a predilection for arson and a face so full of acne even his friends call him Zits. The half-Irish, half-American-Indian narrator of Sherman Alexie's hallucinatory new novel (his first in more than 10 years), has begun to strike out against the court-appointed "Uncle Creepy types" and evil foster mothers he's been asked to live with, shoving the latest mom and landing in a juvenile lockup. There he meets Justice, a white guru and anarchist who advises him to pray and then teaches him how to kill - and be killed. During a shooting spree in a bank, Zits is shot in the head by a guard, whereupon his adolescent soul vacates his corpse, resurfacing in the brawny frame of a racist F.B.I, agent headed for a 1975 meeting with a pair of celebrated Indian activists in Red River, Idaho. Within hours, he'll be asked to shoot someone, and then he'll go home to the agent's beautiful wife. But before the sheets are tousled, Zits is out of this body and back at the battlefield of Little Big Horn, moments before Custer's arrival. "Flight" is the sort of high-concept extravaganza that's ordinarily reserved for summer adventure films, but while there are more than a few "Back to the Future" lines ("He leans over, picks me up and hugs me tightly. And I realize this is my father"), the book is far more stark and morally intricate than any Hollywood blockbuster. 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. There's not much landscape in the background, and the descriptions are the sketchy kind you'd expect from a kid. The narrator's voice is also stripped - of everything except a survivor's intuition. Alexie, while returning to a few of the signature themes of his earlier fiction (abandonment, alcoholism, domestic violence) has no predigested moral to pass on - no easy condemnation of whites or Indians or cops or even the foster care system, though they all get their due. Zits is always hardest on himself. In each of his new incarnations, it takes a beat or two to figure out who the good and bad guys are. "Am I young or old?" he asks a passing couple in a Tacoma alleyway, and then, "Am I white?" Zits is by turns a hero, a coward, a killer, an adulterer - and always a boy in search of his father. The locales arise from the subjects he has mastered by watching television, and later from his own family history. At Little Big Horn, thanks to the History Channel, he knows the identity of the pale Indian with the single eagle feather tied into his braid and the lightning bolts painted on his body. "I am looking at Crazy Horse," Zits tells us. "He was a holy ghost, the Sioux Jesus. Well, sort of like Jesus." Zits also knows the customs and violent desires of the cavalry division he'll lead in the guise of Augustus Sullivan, the best Indian in the United States Army: "Whenever I zig, Gus makes me zag and so, zigzagging through the trees and grass and hills, we make our way toward the Indian camp. And even though I keep thinking, I want to be lost ... I can't do it." No matter what body his narrator is inhabiting, Alexie stays within the margins of a 15-year-old's hyperactive mind, moving from one opinion to the next, from observation to memory, from historical hot spot to historical hot spot. Reading "Flight" is a bit like falling through the sort of nightmares you might have after too much late-night television and spicy food. Or like being asked to close your eyes and listen to a series of visual cues. "I can fall so far inside a person, inside his memories, that I can play them like a movie," Zits says from within the body of a blue-eyed flight instructor who has taught an Ethiopian Muslim named Abbad how to fly a plane. Alexie tells his story the same way. The novel is unceasingly cinematic, and yet the most powerful material is drawn from the boy's memories - of a foster father driven to violence through jealousy or a ridiculed young soldier at Newark Airport with "big old Army-nerd zits on his face. His zits were worse than mine." This soldier and his comrades, Alexie's narrator adds, "are the children we send to fight our wars. I'm the child that Justice sent to war. And all of us children fight to defend adults. Doesn't that seem backward?" And yet, for all the death and violence he navigates, Zits clings to small moments of connection in the lives of his temporary souls - a wife to come home to, a father to comfort him, a friend with whom to soar to the heavens. "Flight" might be categorized as a novel for particularly precocious young adults, but it also works on deeper levels. It's raw and vital, often raucously funny, and there isn't a false word in it. Alexie's narrator is by turns a hero, a coward, a killer, an adulterer - and always a lost teenager seeking his roots. Tom Barbash is the author of a novel, "The Last Good Chance."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
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 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"Call me Zits," says the 15-year-old narrator, an Irish/Native American half-breed with a bad attitude who is constantly in trouble with the law. Just released from Seattle's juvenile jail, Zits decides to enact his own apocalyptic version of the Ghost Dance by walking into the lobby of a downtown bank and shooting people at random. When the guards fire back, Zits is magically transported into the body of an FBI agent ordered to assassinate Indian radicals in the 1970s. Then, just as abruptly, he awakens in the body of a cavalry scout guiding George Armstrong Custer's troops to the Little Bighorn in 1876. Finally, he finds himself inhabiting the body of his own long-lost father. Alexie's (Indian Killer) first novel in a decade is narrated throughout in Zits's sarcastic teenage voice, like an extended stand-up comedy routine. The book's premise of self-discovery through time travel recalls Octavia Butler's classic Kindred (1979), but Flight lacks that book's punch. Historical context is minimal and the incidents pass by quickly, with little impact. This lightweight effort is not up to Alexie's usual standard. For public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/06.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Both victim and victimizer, and roaming through 150 years of American history, 15-year-old Zits is a tough, emotionally beleaguered foster kid, half Indian, half Irish, and, at the story's outset, completely hopeless. The acne sores and scars on his body reveal the state of his soul. Things get better-and much worse-when he consorts with a slightly older boy who calls himself Justice, and takes up the role of serial killer. However, his deadly intent sends Zits back in time, where he variously experiences life as an FBI agent pursuing Indian activists, a 19th-century Indian boy made mute by a white man's weapon, an Indian tracker working for the U.S. Cavalry at the time of Custer, and even his own drunken father at the age of 50. Alexie uses just enough magical realism to keep the story flowing between satire and fantasy, making this an ideal choice for fans of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
