A historian was, as a child, hijacked with her sister on a flight from Israel. Her memories—or lack thereof—form a contrast to what she discovers when researching the event as a historian would. It’s both a personal history and a story about the way that people make memories into history and how all records, including diary entries, are created for a particular audience. ( )

Hodes is a historian, and it feels slightly unfair to expect her to be anything else. However, for me this book felt a bit too much "under the hood," i.e. exposing the methods of a historian investigating something that happened long ago. In this case, of course, the thing that happened happened to her, but she barely remembers her hijacking. So she tells us, over and over.

It was an interesting story, one that, were Hodes a novelist, would have been better served by making it a novel, backed by her historical investigations (much like the Wager). ( )