Review of WE’LL FLY AWAY by Bryan Bliss

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hey, it’s February, and I’m still keeping my New Year’s resolution to review all the novels I read this year. I’m as surprised as you are!

Cover art by Matt Roeser

One of my most promising students, Shawn Stewart (keep an eye out for this talented aspiring writer!) recommended We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss as a possible text for my creative writing classes. He correctly pointed to the use of a mixture of letters from one character and toggling back and forth between 3rd person limited points of view, something Bliss employs deftly, as a feature authors can learn from this book. But our larger conversation was about the quantity of hope we like in our books. We’ll Fly Away is a tragedy in the best way; it provides us with endearing but flawed characters who we know will not succeed, and it makes us desperately want them to succeed throughout. I felt too tense as I devoured this book in mere hours. I am very open with my students about the fact that I am not a fast reader, but this book made me one, not because it was written in that pulse-pounding, low-lexical-level prose appropriate for thrillers, but because, despite its rich, beautiful prose, I needed to know when and how the impending doom would befall the characters.  A bit of writing advice commonly misattributed to Vladimir Nabokov is, “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then, once they are up there, to throw rocks at them.” (It seems the first framing of this advice came in a review of a play in the Bridgeport Herald of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1897, two years before Nabakov was born:  “The best advice ever given writers of farce is in these words: ‘In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.’” Thanks, quoteinvestigator.com!) Bliss follows the most brutal version of this advice, giving us Luke and Toby as protagonists who are trapped in multiple ways: by poverty, by abusive or neglectful parents, by a system that has failed them over and over, and shares their dreams of escape as children who find a broken down airplane in the woods, teenagers looking for escape through sports, violence, romance, sex, alcohol, first loves, and often the pure and desperate desire to simply jump in a car and get as far away from their lives as possible. All the right things bring them back: love of family, girlfriends, responsibility, honor, and bravery, and we’re left screaming internally, “None of those things are worth your lives! Go! Go!”

Ultimately, I think I need a little more hope in my literature than We’ll Fly Away provides, but I’m very glad I read it to help me find that line previously held by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Not to spoil the ending, but I think We’ll Fly Away provides a quantity of hope just between McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian (despite being unlike both those books in almost every way), and I’m not sure I have the constitution for anything more hopeless than The Road. But maybe I can find the same hope in We’ll Fly Away that I grasp for when reading Orwell’s 1984: This is a world we must not make! Unfortunately, We’ll Fly Away is a world that’s all too real for so many people, so many of the students I see come into my classroom each day, imprisoned in more ways than I can imagine. But I can hope for them, and We’ll Fly Away demands the reader close the back cover and get to work making a world that’s better than Luke and Toby’s.