THE SKY WAS OURS

What if flight was freedom?

Burned out and disillusioned 24-year-old grad student Jane goes on the lam, abandoning her classes in computer coding and her family. It’s the early aughts, during George W. Bush’s presidency; America is on the brink of political, economic, and climate collapse; and Jane is searching for a more fulfilling life. In the aptly named town of Lack, in upstate New York, Jane meets the reclusive Barry and his 20-ish son, Ike, who have chosen not to engage with capitalism, instead sustaining themselves entirely on the land. Barry is sure that with the right pair of handmade wings, humans would be able to fly, absolving themselves of the bonds of earthly existence. Charming and persuasive, he enlists Jane to help build his wings; Ike, pragmatic and anxious and sure this pursuit will kill his father, is desperate to keep him alive. Throughout the course of the novel, Jane finds herself, then loses herself again, struggling to hold Barry’s vision alongside the realities of late-stage capitalism. Is flying the solution, or only another danger? Fassler’s prose is dazzling, alive, peppered with rich metaphors: paper cuts that open like “fish gills,” a knife blade “crested with teeth.” Jane is fully embodied, her every touchingly human thought reflected on the page, her disappointment with society ringing true; through her, we can imagine another, more substantive and rewarding life. It’s only in fairly blunt justifications of flying as a proposed solution to capitalist and environmental disaster that the novel begins to falter—Barry, “spilling over with missionary zeal,” routinely goes on bald, unnuanced tirades to the effect of “flight could chart us on a different course, grinding the great global machinery to a halt.” Even Jane: “Why had we done it?...To change everything, because everything so badly needed changing.” These sweeping pedagogical links threaten to prohibit readers themselves from imagining what flight could offer.

A thrilling, hopeful retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.