Pages: 293
Publisher:
Little Brown
Release
Date: 10th
September 2013
Edition:
US paperback,
purchased
Other
Titles by this Author: The
Dust of 100 Dogs, Everybody Sees the Ants,
Ignore Vera Dietz, Reality Boy
How
do you give your love away when no one seems to want it?
You
send it to the sky and hope the right person catches it.
Astrid
Jones spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly
overhead. She doesn’t know the passengers inside, but they’re the only people
who won’t judge her when she asks them her most personal questions...like what
it means that she’s falling in love with a girl. Astrid can’t share the truth
with anyone else in her life – her pushy mother, uninterested father, and
over-interested friends that wouldn’t understand. But little does Astrid know
just how much even the tiniest connection with the people at thirty thousand
feet will affect their lives – and her own – for the better.
In
this truly original portrayal of a girl who refuses to be labelled, Printz
Honor author AS King offers hope to those struggling to break free of society’s
boxes and definitions.
I read AS King’s debut, The Dust of 100 Dogs when it was
released in 2009 and it was so delightfully weird that I’ve bought every one of
her subsequent novels, though it wasn’t until Ask the Passengers that I picked one up. I glad I chose it.
AS King’s writing is beautiful.
Everything about it sucked me in and held me there: the characters, the
emotion, the language, the pain, everything. I especially loved the snippets of
the lives Astrid touched when she sent her love up to the overflying planes. I didn’t
expect to get something like that and instead of interfering with the narrative
as it could have done, it broadened the story. It wasn’t just Astrid suffering the
pain of love, the judgment of her sexuality; she wasn’t alone in her struggles.
It made a powerful impact and I just generally loved the stories within a
story.
The reaching of the story beyond
Astrid continued in her Humanities class. First of all, I wish this class was
an option in my secondary school; I would have loved to spend some of my week
discussing philosophers, thinking and theories. I liked that it had a strong,
solid presence throughout the novel as well – it affected her and made her
strong enough to question the reactions of those around her and her own
feelings and then act on them. The class affected Astrid intensely; so
intensely that she conjured up Frank S. (ie Socrates) in her mind to help her
talk through what she was going through. I loved this spike of magical realism
in the novel, and he really helped Astrid.
Underneath the beauty and the
literary-ness of Ask the Passengers is
a seventeen-year-old girl in love and in pain. I can’t count the numbers of
times I was made angry by the people in her life for their pushiness, their
lack of understanding and how they felt a right to own Astrid’s feelings and
actions. Lots of these moments were ones that you don’t realise how bad they
are until you see them laid out and happening to other people. King knows how
to deliver subtle shocks that alter the way you think, even just for the duration
of the novel.
AS King feels like a sort of
Meg Rosoff to me. Her work is original, thought-provoking, every book delivers
something different, has elements of magical realism and is unfailingly
beautiful. And we all know how much I love Meg Rosoff...
Ask
the Passengers is
a gorgeous exploration to society’s boxes, the need for love, what friendship
really is and the power of making your own decisions. I can’t wait to go back
and read the rest of AS King’s books.
Sophie
Aww, I really need to read this book! That Humanities class sounds so cool *wishful sigh* And a character who is talking to Socrates!! I have to see that :D
ReplyDeleteBtw, don't forget to link-up your review!
http://nijiclovers.blogspot.com/2014/04/lgbt-month-week-3-link-up-giveaways-and.html
OOh, you're so right and I didn't notice until you mentioned it: AS King's writing DOES feel similar to Meg Rosoff's!
ReplyDeleteI recently read this and I think my review is going up on the blog tomorrow? Really enjoyed it though!
Such a fantastic review! i think I definitely have to check this book out, it sounds amazing! Though your comparison to Meg Rosoff is off putting, as I'm really not a fan. But I've heard great things about Ask the Passengers generally, so I think this is definitely one I have to check out. Thanks for the review, Sophie! :)
ReplyDelete