Assessment:
Idea: The determination, suspense, and pilot's life milieu at the heart of Flying Alone are all inherently compelling. The book offers many tense and exciting scenes of in-air danger, a pained love affair, heartbroken accounts of several acquaintances' crashes, vibrant portraits of airport characters, and the sense that its showing readers a fascinating private world, one full of cocky pilots and business owners all too eager to flout the rules.
Prose: York excels at in-the-moment accounts of flight and its dangers, making clear to readers what is happening no matter how complex the physics and the pilots' maneuvering. She's also adept at sketching characters and capturing their essence in dialogue. Her prose is sturdy and unfussy but sometimes repetitive, and often dispassionate to a fault. For all its gripping incidents, Flying Alone often keeps its author's feelings too distant for readers to track, especially in lengthy scenes with her bosses, instructors, and lover.
Originality: York tells her unique story with many individually compelling and surprising incidents to share.
Execution: Flying Alone seems most grounded when its author is facing danger in the air. When the book turns to life on earth, its author's thoughts and feelings are subordinated to lengthy scenes of colleagues and bosses and work where it's not quite clear what York thinks or feels. The material could be more compelling if its author were more present.
Date Submitted: October 06, 2019
