My most vivid memory of recommending this book is to a smart, informed fifth-grade teacher who was looking for something completely different for her class: something her students could sink their teeth into, something that would make them think, something that would take them somewhere they had never been before...She had come in with another title in mind, directed to it by a glowing review. I knew the book she wanted, but when I heard her criteria, No Passengers BeyondThis Point, by the astounding Gennifer Choldenko, was the book I recommended and the book she left with.
Life is difficult, and sometimes, even though we do everything in our power to keep that fact from our children, it comes crashing down on them anyway. That's what siblings Finn, India, and Mouse discover when their house is lost to foreclosure and their mother hustles them onto a plane bound for Denver to live with their uncle until the end of the school year, when she, a teacher, can join them. After experiencing a little turbulence, the plane lands in Falling Bird and the children disembark into an alternate reality. Neither the children nor the reader knows until the last chapter that the plane has crashed and that what they are experiencing is a shared hallucination that demands they each make a choice either to go their separate ways or choose each other as they struggle to remain alive. To illustrate each point of view, the siblings alternate narrating the chapters describing, in turn, the temptations this new world is holding out to them.
Choldenko artfully entices her reader to keep turning the pages to see what choices the children will make even though it isn't clear until the end what is actually going on. Narrated by a fourth character who discovers the very-much-alive children, who have in the end chosen to come back to their family, the final chapter successfully makes the situation clear and realistically concludes the story.
Treating the reader and her characters with great respect, Choldenko presents the world of adult problems and the parallel world of children caught between two realities in an honest and thought-provoking manner. Into this she weaves a fantasty that would prove tempting to any of us, but guides us, as readers, back to reality firm in the belief that this would be our choice, too.
http://www.choldenko.com/
