We'll Fly Away

February 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-This novel explores family abuse, sex, first love, and friendship. Luke and Toby have been best friends since they were kids. Now in their senior year, tensions are rising and their friendship is tested. Luke is a three-time state champion wrestler, known for his hot temper and sticking up for Toby in any situation. Toby defuses tension with his quick wit and humor, while at home his criminal father has begun to take an interest in utilizing his underage son. Both boys have family issues, with abusive fathers and absent mothers, so they rely solely on each other. Alternating between a third-person account of the boys' senior year and Luke's letters to Toby from death row, this fast-paced read will have teens tearing through chapters to find out why Luke is in jail. Once readers have put the pieces together, the conclusion will leave them devastated. This is touching book about male friendship for fans of Jason Reynolds and Matt de la Pena. VERDICT A realistic and emotional story that will be an excellent choice for high school libraries.-Morgan O'Reilly, Riverdale Country School, NY

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 2, 2018
Before Luke ended up on death row, he and his best friend Toby dreamed of escaping rural North Carolina in a beat-up crop duster that they discovered in a wooded area. Alternating between third-person chronicles of Luke and Toby’s senior year of high school and Luke’s letters to his friend from behind bars, Bliss weaves together a compelling and raw story. Luke was a wrestling champion with a mother who wasn’t responsible enough to get to work or feed her family. Toby was a smart kid hiding the bruises from his abusive and drunk father. With hard-hitting authenticity, Bliss conveys both the typical dilemmas of adolescence as well as the more sobering and life-altering moments that Toby and Luke are unfairly forced to confront. At its core, Bliss’s story is a meditation on choices—including the momentary lapses of judgment that can derail whole lives, raising the question of whether a single event can or should define an individual. A powerful story of loyalty, betrayal, and crippling family dysfunction. Ages 14–up.

Starred review from March 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* We know from the beginning of Bliss' latest novel that things won't end well for the characters: the opening pages are the first of many letters Luke writes from death row to his friend Toby. Between letters, Bliss recounts the teens' last year of high school?Luke is trying to cut weight in advance of the state wrestling championships, Toby tries to keep his abusive father at a distance, and despite their long-standing friendship, Luke and Toby's usually reliable bond is starting to crack. For almost all their 18 years, they've relied on each other for safety. Both come from precarious homes, and their dead-end North Carolina town isn't doing them any favors. Luke bears the brunt of responsibility for his two young brothers and his neglectful mother, who struggles to keep food in the fridge, while Toby's hair-trigger father, a small-time criminal who uses smarmy charm to his advantage, lashes out in violence. Thankfully, Luke has channeled his simmering, powerful anger into expert discipline on the wrestling mat, so much so that he has a scholarship to college. If he can just figure out how to take Toby along to Iowa, they'll be home free. But Toby is growing weary of Luke micromanaging his choices, and he's starting to think Luke's plan is half-baked. When Toby starts falling for Lily, a woman Luke thinks is bad news, it might be the final straw for their friendship, especially since Lily inadvertently pulls Toby ever closer to his father's risky orbit. Bliss uses spare, tight language when writing Luke and Toby's story?we get a sense of the hard corners of their lives and tiny glimpses of their past, but he noticeably doesn't spend much time dwelling on their emotions, and neither do the characters. Luke and Toby's conversations dance around the tough stuff, and more often than not, they ultimately land on glib sarcasm or classic high-school vulgarities, anything they can do to avoid the things they're afraid of. Luke's letters, on the other hand, are spilling over with feeling?about Toby; his own guilt; the efforts of court-appointed lawyers, clergy, and other inmates who try (often fruitlessly) to get him to latch on to a modicum of hope; how the very structure of the correctional system serves to sap inmates of their humanity?and that's a sharp contrast to his day-to-day life. I can't open up or tell anybody how I'm feeling or what scares me . . . The only way to live in here is to be completely walled off, to live solely on the inside. That way nobody can take anything from you ever again. It's not until he starts writing letters to Toby that he seems to grasp the enormity of his situation and finally reflects on the events of their senior year with an unclouded eye. Bliss is tackling a heavy topic here, but he keeps the story focused so tightly on the characters that the novel never gets purposeful or preachy. We recognize the injustice of Luke's circumstances, but we don't need statistics or ethical philosophy to get there. Rather, we recognize that injustice by way of compassion and empathy, by seeing Luke for what he is?not a remorseless criminal, but a vividly rendered, multifaceted human besieged by bad choices and a deck stacked against him. With this novel, Bliss isn't asking whether Luke deserves his sentence or whether his actions were justified. Instead, he's quietly and insistently showing us a complex, deeply human and deeply flawed character, and in so doing, he asks whether we can honestly regard the life of a death-row inmate as worthless. The answer is a resolute no. Bliss excels at this kind of storytelling, the sort that zeros in on a character and offers a full, vibrant picture of...

July 1, 2018
When best friends Luke and Toby were kids, they tried to fix up a crop duster they found abandoned in the woods outside their rural North Carolina town, fantasizing it could one day fly them out of their troubled lives. When they got older, the plane became a hangout spot and refuge--when Toby's dad beat him or Luke needed to escape the one-bedroom apartment he lived in with his neglectful mom and much younger brothers. Now that they're high school seniors, the real escape plan is only a year away, when Toby will follow Luke to Iowa on a wrestling scholarship. Yet before readers learn any of this, the novel opens with Luke's first letter to Toby from death row. With Luke's letters as interludes, a third-person narrative flashes back to their senior year, focusing on a significant week in the boys' lives. Everything fits together as readers start to understand the severity of Toby's abuse, the depth of Luke's loyalty (and stifled rage), and the complexities of their dynamic--especially once the boys' respective love interests enter the scene. The outcome will surprise no one, which is, of course, the point: the reading experience is not about learning what put Luke in prison but when it will happen and how. Bliss stokes this tension, evoking the dread of death row and the claustrophobia of a dead-end town, a life you need to escape from. In this truly tragic story there is profundity at every turn, and readers up for heartbreak will come away understanding more about loyalty, empathy, and redemption. katrina Hedeen

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

July 1, 2018
Interspersed with Luke's letters--from death row--to best friend Toby, a third-person narrative flashes back to a significant week in their senior year, slowly revealing the severity of Toby's dad abusing him and the depth of Luke's loyalty (and stifled rage). In this tense and tragic story there is profundity at every turn; readers up for heartbreak will come away understanding more about loyalty, empathy, and redemption.

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from March 1, 2018
From death row, a young man navigates prison and writes to his best friend in this powerful work of realistic fiction.A poignant story of loyalty, abuse, and poverty is woven throughout a narrative that alternates between flashbacks to Luke and Toby's senior year of high school (presented from their perspectives in the third person) and the present-day experience of Luke's incarceration (told in first person through his letters to Toby). This structure allows the novel to build a slow and gripping tension as it progresses, revealing the horrific events that led to Luke's arrest only at the very end, as the other details of the boys' lives naturally unfold. Both are seemingly white. The two struggle to guard their friendship fiercely even as Toby becomes sexually involved with a likable but troubled young woman and Luke falls for a different girl. The two have been lifelong friends, supporting each other through family struggles--Toby's with a physically abusive father and Luke's with a neglectful mother who leaves him playing a parental role to his two younger brothers. Readers will easily empathize with quiet, tightly controlled Luke, who's college-bound on a wrestling scholarship, and goofy, self-effacing Toby.This compassionate and beautifully rendered novel packs an emotional punch. (Fiction. 14-18)