MixedChicago Review of BooksThis family seemed to have remarkably little to work through, other than small eldest/youngest sibling grievances about fairness and responsibility. The biggest issue seems to be that they all don’t like Kate’s annoying husband, Josh, who seems deservedly unlikable. Their love and grief for their mother also reads as completely uncomplicated ... The definition of a good novel is multifold, ever shifting, but, to me, what it comes down to is the ability to both reflect and surprise. Strong succeeds most fully on the first half of the equation ... Strong excels at demonstrating the disjointedness, this awkward reimagining of what everyone is supposed to be to one another now that their mother is gone. Interactions between the in-laws, between the siblings, seem to barely skim the surface of internality, to the depths that must exist beneath their relationships ... All told, I wished for more. The downfall of a multi-person perspective is that it takes that much more work to fully flesh out each character, which, in a 226-page novel, takes a precise and efficient hand ... Strong attempts to sum up the entirety of her character’s personalities in the scope of a couple personalized paragraphs ... In the end, I felt the same about Flight as I did about Want: everything about it sounds right up my alley, Strong’s prose has moments of real heft and poignancy, and yet in the end the novel didn’t quite have the surprise and transcendence necessary to elevate its story of mundanity.
