Flight

Fifteen-year-old "Zits" has outlasted foster home after foster home. Few notice him, let alone care about him. Then Zits finds himself with several guns in his pockets and a choice to make. But at the exact moment of decision, he is thrust into another dimension and travels back in time. Adam Beach's narration is spot-on for a back-talking, unsure, acerbic, wounded teen trying to learn about hate and love. His narration stays attuned to the pace, quickening or slowing with Zits's various encounters. Beach isn't as adept with voices for the people whom Zits meets along the way, but it's the main character's travels and point of view that matter. It's a moving, gripping, engaging, and funny journey, one worth taking to see how a troubled teen ends up. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

April 16, 2007
A deadpan "Call Me Zits" opens the first novel in 10 years from Alexie ("Smoke Signals", etc.), narrated by a self-described "time-traveling mass murderer" whose name and deeds unravel as this captivating bildungsroman progresses. Half-Indian, half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was 10 (after he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several people and is shot dead himself. Zits then commences time-traveling via the bodies of others, finding himself variously lodged in an FBI agent in the '70s (helping to assassinate radical Indian activists); a mute Indian boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn; an Indian tracker named Gus; an airplane pilot instructor (one of whose pupils commits a terrorist act); and his own father. Zits eventually comes back to himself and to an unexpected redemption. While the plot is wisp-thin, one quickly surrenders to Zits's voice, which elegantly mixes free-floating young adult cynicism with a charged, idiosyncratic view of American history. Alexie plunges the book into bracing depths. "(Apr.)" .