- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (May 7 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312290527
- ISBN-13: 978-0312290528
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14.6 x 2.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 476 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,128,601 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
Penzler Pick, April 2002: An exceptionally gripping opening sets the pace for this suspenseful and original thriller from northwest writer April Henry. For those readers old enough to remember the classic 1960s New Wave French film Weekend, it will be easy enough to picture in the mind's eye the panoramic landscape of a massive, chain reaction-induced highway traffic disaster.
For others, Henry's vivid and nightmarish 14-page description is more than up to the task.
In Learning to Fly, the pileup is triggered by a freak eastern Oregon dust storm. Nineteen-year-old heroine Free Meeker is headed home--though not exactly rushing--to tell her laid-back, nonjudgmental, aging hippie parents that she's pregnant. Even more unexpected than the horrific 52-car collision from which she's walked away is the fact that the next day, before she can contact her family, the newspaper reports her among the fatalities.
"She didn't feel like a dead person--but she didn't feel real, either. Wearing only a borrowed muumuu, she was sitting cross-legged on a sagging double bed in a room at the Stay-A-While Motor Inn, three blocks from the hospital. During the night Free has gotten only snatches of sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw dead people, cars cartwheeling through the air, the orange bloom of fire. Over and over again, she has flinched awake, hearing the squeal of tearing metal and the terrible boom of impacts in her dreams."This set of circumstances is hardly enough to give Henry's plot the dense weight of dread it soon manifests. The body identified as Free's turns out to be that of a hitchhiking woman whose husband is a single-minded sadist-abuser who soon vengefully targets Free as his missing wife's rescuer. Moreover, the suitcase handed to Free by a suffering young man--he soon succumbs to his injuries--as she fled the scene of the disaster is revealed to contain nearly a million dollars that belongs to some impatient and unforgiving drug dealers.
This is a substantially loaded deck, and Free's intuitively self-preserving ability (after all, she has another life to consider) to play her own hand in response is what makes the novel, Henry's fourth, such compulsive reading. A classic tale of an innocent on the lam, Learning to Fly has the kind of plot that would have made Hitchcock smile in evil anticipation of its cinematic possibilities. And it's the kind of story that makes A Simple Plan by comparison look... simple. --Otto Penzler
From Publishers Weekly
After three books (the Agatha- and Anthony-nominee Circles of Confusion, etc.) featuring an amateur sleuth whose day job involves making sure people don't create any nasty messages with their vanity license plates, Henry has produced a stand-alone thriller that is far darker and uglier than any novel in her Claire Montrose series. A gruesome freeway pileup (52 vehicles, 14 deaths) has unexpected benefits for a young woman whose hippie parents named her Free: a new identity plus a bag containing $750,000 in drug money. When a passenger in her car, killed in the carnage, is mistakenly identified as Free, suddenly our pregnant, unemployed heroine has a way out of her problems and the money to finance it. She becomes Lydia, and assembles a new life in what she believes is the safe obscurity of another woman's persona. But then two dangerous men start to track her: a vicious drug dealer, who wants his money back, and Lydia's sicko husband, who wants his punching-bag wife back. In tone, mood and structure, this is a major departure from the Claire Montrose adventures, and fans may not forgive the author for depriving them of their favorite guessing game (try deciphering 6ULDV8, or CUNQRT). The harrowing accident scene (based loosely on a real event) that opens the story is very strong, but its promise goes largely unfulfilled by a fair-to-middling middle and then a predictable ending. All told this is but a passable thriller that lacks the originality readers of Henry's earlier books have come to expect. 2BAD. NYSTRY, but NTKWT.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
The moment before Free Meeker drove into the dust storm, the sky was a clear bleached blue. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
The moment before Free Meeker drove into the dust storm, the sky was a clear bleached blue. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A superior character driven thriller,
By
This review is from: Learning to Fly (Hardcover)
Free Meeker, a nineteen-year-old free spirit and soon to be an unwed mother is involved in a fatal pile up on a highway blinded by a dust storm. She survives but a fellow passenger, a hitchhiker, named Lydia, is killed. Lydia was running away from an abusive relationship with her husband. After finding a gym bag filled with drug money, Free decides to assume Lydia's identity and run away to start a new life for herself and her, as yet, unborn child. Of course, life is never so simple. Looking for Lydia is her enraged husband and Don Cannon, a drug dealer who desperately needs the money that Free has found or he will, himself, be killed.April Henry has written a stand-alone novel with the subtext of "a thriller", Actually, LEARNING TO FLY should be more properly called a novel of suspense. April's novel is character driven while most true thrillers would be considered plot driven. The difference, as I see it, between the two is that the pacing would be much more rapid with the plot driven thrillers. The character driven thrillers must, by definition, move slower to allow the reader the time to get to know the character. April succeeds in creating an interesting yet sympathetic figure in Free Meeker. There are some character motivations that were not completely explained such as why a young policeman would be interested in an unwed pregnant woman. Otherwise, LEARNING TO FLY is a well-written novel that should appeal to readers on the beach or in the air. Personally, I would like to see a bit of a tighter plot but this one certainly succeeds as is.
4.0 out of 5 stars
I vividly remember this book 2 years later,
By Prangster (West Linn, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Learning to Fly (Hardcover)
If you are a fan of Henry's cozies, this is not quite the right book for you - but it does have a happy (kinda, sorta) ending. The writing is crisp, vivid, and effective. Oregon actually experienced the kind of dust-storm disaster so horrifically described in the opening. All of the characters are a little larger than life, which is why they are so memorable, including the City of Portland. I remember this book, enjoyed it a lot and hope you do too.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Formulaic and disappointing.,
By
This review is from: Learning to Fly (Hardcover)
The comparison another reviewer makes with Mary Higgins Clark is apt. Shallow characters, predictable plot twists, and writing on the level of a high-school junior. It is incredible how the author runs out of gas for the final chapter and brings all the threads together in a couple of pages. If one didn't know better, and I don't, it would appear that the publisher told her she had only two more pages to use so she'd better finish it up. Or maybe the author was just too lazy to write a credible ending.
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