A big plot point is what to do with Helen’s house in Florida.

Why do you think the author included the Quinn/Maddie storyline? How did it help enhance this family story?.

We learn about their mother, Helen, through everyone’s memories of her.

Why was it important for this family to keep up their mother’s holiday traditions?.

Did you relate to any of the characters?.

Did you feel it was easy to keep track of or did you find it confusing at times?

There’s a lot of characters and storylines in this story.

Why do you feel Flight was chosen as the book title? What does it represent to the story as a whole?.

Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” ( Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York.

Sometimes stories wrap up everything nicely in the end but I felt this one was more of a snapshot of the family at this given time. That’s a lot going on and plenty of unanswered questions as well. I think a show format could also balance all the different characters and their various journeys quite well.

Flight is one of those stories I could see being turned into a mini series.

Want by Lynn Steger Strong