Zits may not be the angriest protagonist in literary history, but he surely must come close. In FLIGHT, we meet Zits (not his real name, but as he puts it his "real name isn't important") on his first day in a new foster home. The nickname derives, of course, from the overabundance of acne he's afflicted with.

Zits is 15 years old, with all the emotional baggage one carries at that age and much more. His Irish mother died when he was six and his Native American father abandoned them, by his account, "two minutes after I was born" and, ever since, Zits has been kicked around from foster home to foster home – twenty, in all. The first chapter, in which Zits meets yet another blithely dysfunctional foster family, perfectly captures his witty, if world-weary, teenaged view of the mess that is his life, as well as his complete disdain for all adult authority.

After getting off to a less-than-ideal start with the folks, Zits reacts in the way he knows best – he runs – but the cops catch up to him. He's taken into custody and befriended, to an extent, by a well-intended cop. In fact, Officer Dave tries to mentor the boy, regarding him as more than just the pimply loser Zits perceives himself to be. However, Zits isn't ready to hear what Officer Dave has to say. Instead, he falls in with a charismatic, slightly older teen he meets in detention. The older boy lures Zits into committing an act of extreme, random violence, by virtually brainwashing him into believing he will benefit from it.

Zits goes along with the program and commits the horrible act – a mass shooting at a bank, during which he gets shot in the head. However, he doesn't die. Instead, he's launched through a series of time traveling, out-of-body experiences, or to be more accurate, experiences in other people's bodies.

Read more: http://time-travel-fiction.suite101.c... ( )

I loved Alexie's narrative voice, which is vibrant and fast-paced and very much alive, but Flight as a whole felt like something of an aborted epic, compressed into the space of a novella. Alexie's narrative skips through time and place—a reservation in 1970s Idaho; a Native American settlement on the eve of Custer's Last Stand—but none of the places we visit feel real, none of them feel as if they existed in three dimensions. With greater subtlety and substantiality, I think this could have been a very good book; as it is, I think only the charm of Alexie's storytelling makes this novella worth reading. ( )

Though short, this was a difficult book for me to make my way through. The story of Zits, a more-or-less homeless half-Indian teen with a private history of abuse and abandonment and a public history of arson and escape from foster homes, is wrenching enough, but the other lives he inhabits as he carooms through time add additional layers of pain, betrayal, and sadness. Part of this is because though Zits finds himself within a variety of bodies in a variety of times, he is unable to change history. While he can impact personal choices, his knowledge of the inevitable final outcome tinges even the small personal triumphs with an overarching sense of tragedy. Still, the book ends hopefully, with Zits given the opportunity to make a personal choice that has the potential to change his future. ( )

Like all of Alexie's novels it is a quick enjoyable read. Not quite on par with his other work, but perhaps because it is deriviative of the others. A young American-Indian boy (Zits) is caught up in the foster care system. Angry and alone he enters a vision-quest somewhate akin to "quantum leap" where is transported to other times and other bodies, helping him to understand history, perspective, and his own father who abandoned him. ( )

First Line: Call me Zits.

I first became a fan of Sherman Alexie when I watched the film Smoke Signals. The fandom intensified when I read Indian Killer. Now that I've read Flight, I may just graduate to waving his books in the faces of everyone I meet, exclaiming, "You gotta read these!" Alexie is a powerful, imaginative writer with a talent for making readers see other people, other cultures, in a whole new--and very real-- way.

Everyone in Flight calls the main character "Zits", and if you wonder how Zits thinks of himself, he'll tell you:

" I'm a blank sky, a human solar eclipse."

Zits is half Indian, half Irish. His alcoholic father took off when he was born. His mother died when he was six. His aunt kicked him out when he was ten after he set her boyfriend on fire. (Don't feel too bad for the boyfriend; he was a pedophile.) Now he's fifteen. He's been in twenty foster homes and twenty-two schools. He has barely enough clothes to fit in a backpack. He's a throwaway kid, and he wants revenge, so one day he takes a gun and walks into a bank...and begins a series of adventures in time travel. No time machine for Zits; the gun is the catalyst for his stints as a mute Indian boy during the Battle of the Little Big Horn, an FBI agent, an Indian tracker, an airplane pilot instructor, and his own father. His desire for revenge rapidly becomes an ongoing lesson in empathy.

The book had barely begun when I fell for Zits hook, line and sinker. What did he say? Something that every passionate reader will understand:

" I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?"

Alexie's skilled pen makes Zits anything but a throwaway kid in the reader's mind. I empathized with this lonely young boy, my heart broke when his broke, I became angry when he did. As Zits time-traveled, his attitude began to change, and I found myself hoping with all my heart that he no longer thought of himself as worthless; that someone somewhere would see how valuable he was.

What better thing can you say about a writer than that you were totally involved in what happened to his fictional character? That, for a short period of time, you were transported miles away from your comfort zone and confronted with people totally alien to you, and that you began to care, to get angry, and to be compelled to do something? ( )