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The Art Of Uncontrolled Flight
Kim Ponders
#UA6432
Hardcover, 183 pages; 2005
$9.95
I'm not like other women, she wants to say. And thank God. She learned at the Academy how not to be like a woman, how not to be weak, how not to cry, how not to have PMS, or even periods, as if to be female meant to put forth a constant effusion of unpleasant secretions, as if to be a man was to withhold.
This is Kim Ponders's first novel—and it's a corker. As a flight test engineer for the Air Force Reserve, she knows something about the predominantly male world of military pilots that her novelist's protagonist, Annie Shaw, inhabits. Annie's parents are almost mythical figures: her mother beautiful and glamorous, her father garrulous and manly. After her mother's death in a fire that she, as a six-year-old escapes, Annie becomes more and more intrigued with flight, eventually graduating from the Air Force Academy just in time to serve in the first Gulf War. After saving a fellow airman's life, she's hailed as a hero—but is she? Ponders writes with grace and intelligence, taking on complex issues in an unadorned style.
(EE)
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