The best-selling author of multiple award-winning books returns with his first novel in ten years, a powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while breaking our hearts. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and again, groundbreaking Alexie. His first novel in over a decade, Sherman Alexie's Flight winds themes of alienation, revenge, and forgiveness through its narrator's time-traveling adventures. Critics were impressed with the clever Zits: his thoughts and actions are both humorous and painfully genuine, the essence of troubled adolescence. However, reviewers complained about the lack of depth, of fully developed secondary characters, and of historical detail. Many critics also noted that the plot's swift pace and tidy ending were more appropriate for juvenile fiction. The New York Times , on the other hand, considered these elements part of the novel's charm. Though Alexie's latest effort may disappoint some readers, many will still find snatches of his trademark humor and moving prose. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. It's tough enough to be an orphan and a ward of the state, let alone a so-called half-breed. Heck, being 15 years old is no freaking picnic, especially if your face is so badly marred by acne your nickname is Zits. Add to that a devastating history of abuse, and no wonder Zits, a gun in each hand, is about to exact revenge on strangers in a bank. Has Alexie, a high-profile writer known for provocative, inventive, in-your-face fiction about Native American life, written a classic troubled youth-turned-killer tale? Of course not. This is a time-travel fable about the legacy of prejudice and pain. Zits is inexplicably catapulted back to 1975, where he inhabits the body of a white FBI agent confronting radical Indian activists, the first episode in an out-of-body odyssey. Smart, funny, and resilient, Zits is profoundly transformed, as the hero in a tale of ordeals is supposed to be, by his shape-shifting experiences as an Indian boy at Little Big Horn, an Indian tracker, a homeless Indian drunk, and a pilot in unnerving proximity to a Muslim terrorist. Alexie's concentrated and mesmerizing novel of instructive confrontations is structured around provocative variations on the meanings and implications of flight as it asserts that people of all backgrounds are equally capable of good and evil. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "A funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious voice set beside his elder . . . contemporaries . . . Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth." -- Joyce Carol Oates The year is 2007; the hero, a throwaway kid named Zits. Half-Native American, half- Irish, an orphan since the age of 6, Zits is a self-proclaimed blank sky, a solar eclipse. He inherited his mother's green eyes and his father's acne. At 15, he has lived in 20 different foster homes, gone to 22 different schools and owns just enough clothing to fill a backpack. Then one day, looking for revenge, he takes a trip back in time and gets a chance at redemption. Where H.G. Wells used a time machine and Jack Finney used hypnosis, Sherman Alexie uses a gun as a mode of transport in his entertaining new novel, Flight. The story opens as Zits wakes up in yet another foster home, has a stare-down contest with his brutish foster father, shoves his whiney foster mother and ends up in juvie, the routine as familiar to him as sunrise. In jail, he meets a wise and well-read white boy, Justice, who apologizes for his race's aggression toward Native Americans and encourages Zits to perform a Ghost Dance, dancing the white people away. Once out of jail, Justice gives Zits two guns, one real, one paint, and Zits ghost dances in a bank, where he gets shot in the head. At the moment of impact, his journey through time begins. Zits's odyssey is actually a vision quest on which he learns that revenge is bloody painful. Landing in 1975, Zits inhabits the body of FBI agent Hank Storm and finds himself suddenly sympathetic