Girl on a Plane

June 20, 2016
Anna, the 15-year-old narrator of this novel based on events in Moss’s life, is traveling alone from Bahrain back to her British boarding school when Palestinian hijackers reroute her plane to a desert in Jordan. Moss (This Is the Mountain) capably evokes the tense, dangerous atmosphere of the hijacking and the passengers’ four-day imprisonment, which includes angry terrorist guards, hunger, fear, extreme temperatures, hygiene challenges, and constant smoking and drinking by terrified adults. Anna’s kinship with a child and teen sitting near her offers moments of levity and mutual support. However, the harrowing subject is more compelling than the narrative execution, which includes some awkward jumps between Anna’s first-person perspective and third-person sections that follow her family’s reactions to unfolding events. Anna can seem less a fully rounded character than a lens for events, and the same is somewhat true of Jamal, a hijacker, who comes across more a device to explain the political and historical background of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Even so, Moss’s novel offers insight into a traumatic chapter of history. Ages 12–up.

July 1, 2016
This thinly fictionalized tale recounts a hijacking the author survived in 1970.Fifteen-year-old Anna is grumpy about boarding the plane that will take her from her dad's army posting in Bahrain to her boarding school back in England. Instead, though, her plane is hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to the Jordanian desert. There, in the unventilated airplane and with scarcely any food or water, Anna spends four days waiting for the British government to release a PFLP prisoner. Blonde Anna, like the majority of her fellow passengers, appears to be white and neither Jewish nor Arab, though a few Arab passengers are let go early. (In this fictionalized account there is no mention of the 56 hostages, primarily Jews, who were segregated from the other passengers and held captive for weeks longer.) A welcome perspective on the difficult historical realities in which terrorism emerges is perhaps overwhelmed by a little too much sympathy; when teen hijacker Jamal asks Anna, if she'd encountered his circumstances, "Might you be here too?" she only thinks, "I can't answer him." Stockholm syndrome is one thing, as is empathy with the expulsion of the Palestinians, but most in Jamal's situation do not, in fact, hijack planes. Meanwhile, several other hijackers exhibit unpleasant Arab stereotypes, including wild or bulging eyes, often screaming in rage. Nonetheless, a quality nail-biter, if other sources are available to help with the history. (Historical fiction. 12-14)

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July 1, 2016

Gr 7 Up-Fifteen-year-old Anna has been living in Bahrain with her family while her father has been stationed there by the British Armed Forces. She is supposed to fly back to her English boarding school by herself. It is September 1970, and the plane is hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who force the pilot to land the plane at a deserted airstrip in the Jordanian desert and turn off the power. The guerrillas demand the release of imprisoned PFLP members, and they threaten to blow up the plane and kill the passengers unless their demands are met. Anna and her fellow passengers suffer from heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and the claustrophobic confinement of the plane as they wait to see whether they will live or die. It is implied that one of the guerrillas sexually assaults a young woman on the plane, but this is never made explicit. Moss was a teenager when she was on a plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in the fall of 1970, and this book is a slightly fictionalized version of her experience. This is an intense, realistic, and absolutely gripping story; many readers have never heard of this incident and won't know the outcome. It is not a one-sided treatment; a PFLP guerrilla tells Anna about the deaths of his family members and atrocities that occurred in Palestine. VERDICT An excellent choice for a book discussion or for a class on world history, and a thrilling read.-Kathleen E. Gruver, Burlington County Library, Westampton, NJ

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