With the threat of air tragedy looming, characters’ personalities shift. The plane crashes are at the center of Blume’s tale, but she’s far more focused on how her fictional characters cope with uncertainty. Blume succeeds in capturing the condition of an entire community - from the claustrophobia of families living with three generations in one household to the subtle class differences between families in the same neighborhood, particularly between middle- and upper-class Jews. There are enough characters and story linesĪt the start of the novel to confuse even an attentive reader, but about a third of the way in, it starts to click. The book begins and ends with an unnecessary prologue and epilogue set in the 1980s, when a grown Miri is returning to Elizabeth to memorialize the crashes, but most of the book keeps us in the past.
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