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Flight: A Novel
In her haunting debut novel, Flight, Ginger Strand creates an unforgettable portrait of a midwestern family navigating an indelibly changed world. Will Gruen loves to fly. As a Michigan farm boy, he longed to clear a furrow through sky, not land. Since then, he has pursued speed and forward motion, from his Air Force service in Vietnam to his thirty years as a commercial pilot for TWA. His passion for flight is matched only by his love for the family farm he considers his personal refuge. But in the aftermath of September 11, Will's world implodes. As he nears mandatory retirement, his beloved airline has collapsed. His wife is turning his farm into a bed-and-breakfast. His older daughter has chosen an open marriage, and her sister has fled seven hundred miles away to New York. Now, with the wedding of their younger daughter approaching, the Gruen family is coming home. Over three emotional days, the past collides with the present, secrets are revealed, new ties are made and old ones broken as each of the Gruens stands at the brink of taking a step that could not only change the path of one life but could alter the family's course. Deftly entwining the voices of Will and his colorful family, Strand creates a dazzling, multilayered chronicle of ordinary Americans in an era of sweeping hange -- and of people with only love to keep them aloft in an uncertain world.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2005
1 person is currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Ginger Strand
15 books13 followersGinger Strand is an American essayist, novelist, environmental writer, and historian. Her 2005 debut novel Flight was adapted from several of her short stories. Her published books of non-fiction include Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies in May 2008 and Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate in 2012.
Ginger Strand grew up mostly on a farm in Michigan. Her family moved often while her father served in the Air National Guard. Throughout her childhood, she lived in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her father later worked as a commercial airline pilot for TWA for 35 years. Strand is a 1992 graduate from Princeton University. She has a daughter and lives in New York City. She teaches environmental criticism at Fordham University, and teaches writing at the 92nd Street Y.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper's, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. Strand has received residency grants from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as a Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is a contributing editor at Orion. Strand is also a former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton University.
Strand is also an environmental writer. She has been critical of Google’s environmental policies. In a November 2006 New York Times story, she talks about her personal difficulty in being eco-conscious.
She lists her obsessions as water, ancient Rome, infrastructure, SuperFund, airplanes, silent film, panopticons, P. T. Barnum, photography, lies, the 1930s, Niagara Falls, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Edward Wormley, consumerism and rhinoceroses, especially one named Clara who lived in the 18th century.
(from Wikipedia)
Ginger Strand grew up mostly on a farm in Michigan. Her family moved often while her father served in the Air National Guard. Throughout her childhood, she lived in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her father later worked as a commercial airline pilot for TWA for 35 years. Strand is a 1992 graduate from Princeton University. She has a daughter and lives in New York City. She teaches environmental criticism at Fordham University, and teaches writing at the 92nd Street Y.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper's, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. Strand has received residency grants from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as a Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is a contributing editor at Orion. Strand is also a former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton University.
Strand is also an environmental writer. She has been critical of Google’s environmental policies. In a November 2006 New York Times story, she talks about her personal difficulty in being eco-conscious.
She lists her obsessions as water, ancient Rome, infrastructure, SuperFund, airplanes, silent film, panopticons, P. T. Barnum, photography, lies, the 1930s, Niagara Falls, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Edward Wormley, consumerism and rhinoceroses, especially one named Clara who lived in the 18th century.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 5, 2009
Flight is a story about family. Real family. The kind with dysfunctions in every closet. Set in a fictional rural Michigan town, the Gruen family gathers on the family farm to celebrate the wedding of youngest daughter, Leanne.
Will Gruen, the father, is a pilot who is feeling his age and the fast approach of what may be his last opportunity as a commercial airline pilot. He has received an offer that would mean relocating to Hong Kong, and he has yet to gather the courage to broach the subject with wife, Carol. He wonders if he might accept the transfer even if Carol does not agree to go with him.
And she might not. On Carol's mind is a bed and breakfast, and as she moves about the farmhouse in wedding preparations, her mind is filled with ideas of transformation for the farmhouse into a business, and with it, the giddy seduction of independence.
Eldest daughter Margaret has secrets of her own. She arrives making excuses for an absentee husband, but over the span of the three days of wedding preparation, it is revealed that divorce, complete with messy custody battles, is impending.
But surely the bride is happy? No. The bride is sneaking drinks from a silver flask, and not only does she suffer cold feet the night before the wedding-she takes flight.
Ginger Strand's first novel takes on family drama with openhearted courage. The reader is allowed to feel a part of the wedding hustle and madness, and to be one of the family, without fanfare, roll up your sleeves and help shell the shrimp.
Strand's literary style is straightforward with just the right spice of wit. She tells an everyday story with flair and humor. A subtle parallel image throughout the drama is a pair of caged doves being kept for dramatic release at the wedding ceremony. Throughout the movement of the story, now and then, here and there, the characters check the doves: are they perhaps feeling ill from being caged too long and kept in the garage? Will they take flight on cue?
Recommended.
Will Gruen, the father, is a pilot who is feeling his age and the fast approach of what may be his last opportunity as a commercial airline pilot. He has received an offer that would mean relocating to Hong Kong, and he has yet to gather the courage to broach the subject with wife, Carol. He wonders if he might accept the transfer even if Carol does not agree to go with him.
And she might not. On Carol's mind is a bed and breakfast, and as she moves about the farmhouse in wedding preparations, her mind is filled with ideas of transformation for the farmhouse into a business, and with it, the giddy seduction of independence.
Eldest daughter Margaret has secrets of her own. She arrives making excuses for an absentee husband, but over the span of the three days of wedding preparation, it is revealed that divorce, complete with messy custody battles, is impending.
But surely the bride is happy? No. The bride is sneaking drinks from a silver flask, and not only does she suffer cold feet the night before the wedding-she takes flight.
Ginger Strand's first novel takes on family drama with openhearted courage. The reader is allowed to feel a part of the wedding hustle and madness, and to be one of the family, without fanfare, roll up your sleeves and help shell the shrimp.
Strand's literary style is straightforward with just the right spice of wit. She tells an everyday story with flair and humor. A subtle parallel image throughout the drama is a pair of caged doves being kept for dramatic release at the wedding ceremony. Throughout the movement of the story, now and then, here and there, the characters check the doves: are they perhaps feeling ill from being caged too long and kept in the garage? Will they take flight on cue?
Recommended.
November 30, 2015
Ginger Strand’s Flight is one of my favorite novels that should have been a national sleeper hit. The characters are three-dimensional with rich backstories that are masterfully weaved by the author. It is a reminder that we are all fallen humanity who, despite the exterior or glaze, we put on, we have flaws, insecurities, and histories that bubble up at opportune and inopportune times. The stories in this family remind me that no longer do the families that 'eat together stay together.' That perhaps the families that commiserate and share Prozac prescriptions stay together and that above all we thirst to be understood.
November 2, 2020
Not sure where I got this book. It was about a family getting ready for youngest daughter wedding. Hard to follow in many places. Unrealistic in my mind. Not a clean read.
October 25, 2007
This book is so real that it was almost hard to read. I felt like I could be part of this family, even though I have never been to this place or had a sister. Ginger Strand is my new hero, she wrote a book I should have gotten my ducks in a row and wrote long ago. Not that I could have written this in such eloquence anyway.
May 15, 2011
An excellent story about family dynamics and children returning home as adults. I was familiar with the small town setting in central Michigan, plus the I-94 corridor around Chicago and thought the author captured it all beautifully and realistically. The setting plays a key role in the plot. Definitely a GOOD READ.
July 18, 2007
I enjoyed the seamless transition from all four points of view. I also enjoyed the all-encompassing theme of "flight" and the fact that the author used present tense throughout. It was written very well; however, I was not a fan of the plotline.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews