The Sky Was Ours

Starred review from February 26, 2024
The dream of flight enthralls an aimless young woman in Fassler’s stunning debut. In the mid-2000s, 24-year-old Jane Hannah-Smith impulsively flees her coding program in Ithaca, N.Y., landing in the tiny town of Lack near the Canadian border. There, she’s drawn to eccentric Barry Haliban, who’s living off the grid in a dilapidated house and working on making human-powered wings. His son, Ike, tries to convince him of the futility of the project and warns him of the risks after Barry sustains several serious injuries from failed flight attempts. Still, with Jane at his side, Barry persists, driven not just by the desire to fly but to share the knowledge with others. He envisions a secret unregulated movement of DIY wing-makers and fliers, one that would render national borders meaningless and the police powerless to stop them. When Barry and Jane finally soar through the air with their stick-and-linen contraptions, they’re intoxicated by the sensation (“There was nothing but the rush of wind in my ears and a sense of life-giving speed”). Fassler’s audacious premise is buoyed by pristine prose and vibrant characterizations. The result is a captivating fairy tale of the slippery line between fanatic and genius. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

March 1, 2024
Twentysomething Jane, wandering aimlessly, finds herself in the tiny town of Lack. She's parked underneath the town's iconic water tower when a young man arrives by bicycle and begins threading flower stems through the steps of the tower ladder. Intrigued, Jane follows him to a rundown Victorian house in the woods. She explores, finding a barn on the property filled with gliders and wings. A man named Barry discovers her there. Barry, owner of the estate, is obsessed with the possibility of human flight, if only the right wings can be perfected. Barry begs Jane to help and, having nowhere else to go, she agrees to stay with him and his protective son, Ike, the boy she had followed. Barry's experimentations continue until, mirabile dictu, he succeeds and soars. Jane and Ike also fly and, at Barry's insistence, contrive an unsophisticated way to spread the news of flight, which Barry insists will save the world (how is never really delineated). With its soup�on of magical realism, Fassler's intriguing novel is beautifully written--books' many-colored spines are like "a rainbow put through a paper shredder." This is a book that invites deliberation, as further evidenced by the included discussion guide.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2024
What if flight was freedom? Burned out and disillusioned 24-year-old grad student Jane goes on the lam, abandoning her classes in computer coding and her family. It's the early aughts, during George W. Bush's presidency; America is on the brink of political, economic, and climate collapse; and Jane is searching for a more fulfilling life. In the aptly named town of Lack, in upstate New York, Jane meets the reclusive Barry and his 20-ish son, Ike, who have chosen not to engage with capitalism, instead sustaining themselves entirely on the land. Barry is sure that with the right pair of handmade wings, humans would be able to fly, absolving themselves of the bonds of earthly existence. Charming and persuasive, he enlists Jane to help build his wings; Ike, pragmatic and anxious and sure this pursuit will kill his father, is desperate to keep him alive. Throughout the course of the novel, Jane finds herself, then loses herself again, struggling to hold Barry's vision alongside the realities of late-stage capitalism. Is flying the solution, or only another danger? Fassler's prose is dazzling, alive, peppered with rich metaphors: paper cuts that open like "fish gills," a knife blade "crested with teeth." Jane is fully embodied, her every touchingly human thought reflected on the page, her disappointment with society ringing true; through her, we can imagine another, more substantive and rewarding life. It's only in fairly blunt justifications of flying as a proposed solution to capitalist and environmental disaster that the novel begins to falter--Barry, "spilling over with missionary zeal," routinely goes on bald, unnuanced tirades to the effect of "flight could chart us on a different course, grinding the great global machinery to a halt." Even Jane: "Why had we done it?...To change everything, because everything so badly needed changing." These sweeping pedagogical links threaten to prohibit readers themselves from imagining what flight could offer. A thrilling, hopeful retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 3, 2024

DEBUT Deeply disappointed and deeply in debt, twentysomething Jane abandons a less-than-satisfying career path as a software programmer, only to land in Lack, a small rural town in New York State. Thus begins Fassler's (The Atlantic's "By Heart" series) creative retelling of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. In Lack, Jane encounters Ike and his brilliant albeit offbeat father Barry, who is obsessed with designing wings to enable humans to fly, seeing it as the path to human transcendence. Jane succumbs to Barry's charisma as much as his revolutionary ideals, while Ike's patience, thoughtfulness, and reason offer a different approach. Fassler skillfully describes Jane's diving and soaring flight toward growth and maturity, a struggle to avoid flying too close to the sun that Barry's fanaticism depicts. VERDICT Fassler excels at detailing the nuances of his three characters' personalities as well as the landscape of Lack and the beauty of human flight. True to its original source, this is a powerful parable about the promise of freedom through flight, balanced against the perils of human hubris and the limits of technology and innovation.--Faye A. Chadwell

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.