When I launched my Instagram account 10 months ago, I wanted to post author interviews. But I hardly knew any authors. I saw Strong’s novel Want all over, on recommended reading lists and in glowing reviews. Her career was fire.

Strong didn’t know me. But she agreed to answer questions for my account, which had a couple hundred followers at the time.

So lets stipulate that Strong is a ridiculously generous person who performs kind acts for strangers.

🕊
Her latest book Flight tells the story of three siblings and their spouses and kids, gathered for their first Christmas after the death of their mother. In addition to grappling with the loss of their beloved matriarch, they must negotiate the ever-tricky subject of splitting her estate.

The scenario is relatable, with fleshed out characters and engaging dialogue. The narrative is elevated by the story of a second family woven throughout – a single mother, a recovering addict, with no family ties, scarce resources, and a fear of losing custody of her daughter.

Flight asks us to examine what is really valuable in this world, challenging the ways our capitalist system relentlessly focuses us on the wrong stuff. The book offers a roadmap to how we can preference the truly essential and worthwhile. In Flight, Strong has developed new characters in a way that builds on the social and psychological insights of her prior novel, Want (also essential reading).

Strong’s arguments are enhanced by knowing that she practices what she preaches. I have benefited from her uncompensated kindness. It’s so rare in this money-driven world for a stranger to volunteer the heart of their talents, (in this case, Strong’s words), for free. When she answered my interview questions in such a thoughtful way (link in bio), I was floored.

In sum - Flight is the perfect holiday gift. Strong is the role model I aspire to be. Buy this book for yourself, family and friends asap!🎄

I’m generally a fan of family dramas, so I was really looking forward to Flight, which tells the story of adult siblings coming together with their families for their first Christmas after their mom died. Unfortunately, I think my hopes were too high, because this book just didn’t work for me.

While I liked the premise and even some of the characters, I felt like there were too many to keep up with and I had to keep pausing to remember which sibling/spouse/child was who. With a large cast of characters, frequent POV switches, and a short book, I never felt settled in. Also, bickering adult siblings is a pet peeve for me, so that was a big strike.

The central conflict between the siblings felt uninspired, and I just didn’t care about it. The secondary storyline focusing on one of the sisters-in-law and her struggle with fertility was much more interesting to me, and I wish there had been more pages devoted to that.

I have seen many raves for this book, so it may just be a me problem. Perhaps if I had read this closer to the holidays I would have enjoyed it more.

Lynn Steger Strong’s new novel focuses on three adult siblings (Martin, Henry and Kate) who get together with their families in upstate New York to celebrate Christmas after the matriarch, Helen, has died. It is a family drama that takes place over three days and delves deep into family dynamics and art, grief, shame, and love. I loved the writing and the story.

The siblings convene at Henry and Alice’s old farmhouse where Henry works on his art in the barn. Alice stopped making art and turned to social work after the couple suffered pregnancy loss.

Martin is married to Tess, a high strung lawyer who loved Helen so much. “I don’t understand intimacy. I’ll always be pretending. I was jealous of how entitled you all felt to her - like you just knew she would make herself available to you if and when you needed. I probably bitched about it to Martin, but mostly I was just so blood-spit tingly jealous. Mostly I just wished she was mine like that.

Kate is a stay-at-home mom who wants to convince her siblings to let her family live in her mother’s Florida home. They don’t have the money to buy them out since her husband Josh’s trust fund is gone after some bad investments.

To me, this is the perfect holiday book.

I ended up reading this book about 3 adult siblings and their families coming together the first Christmas after their mom dies because it was recommended by Lily King. Perhaps her recommendation elevated my expectations because King is a masterful writer and storyteller. In comparison to King, this book was just okay. The setting makes this book a great choice to curl up with on a cold night right before Christmas.

A very realistic look at family dynamics and how the bonds between siblings can be tested when an inheritance comes in to play. Very well written with relatable, flawed characters- highly recommend!

Flight shows how two brothers and their sister handle their grief over their beloved mother’s death,. Set over two days from December 22 to 24 when the siblings and their spouses and children gather at brother Henry and his wife Alice’s home where deciding about the inheritance of their mother’s Florida home hovers over them. The differences in the ways each of the women think about motherhood pervades the atmosphere. When Alice, who has had multiple miscarriages becomes close to the child of one of her clients and that child disappears, it’s a catalyst for all their yearnings and concerns. This is a fast-paced, character-driven family novel that book clubs will enjoy discussing.

I typically love dysfunctional family stories, but I have to at least find a redeeming quality in one character to enjoy the story. I didn't like any of the characters in this one, and the writing was a bit too simplistic for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-copy.

The cast of characters who convene at Christmastime in “Flight” feel like people I know: they are all struggling with the dull drama of the everyday in their own way as parents, spouses, and siblings and yes, sometimes they’re aggravating and you’ll want to shake them into seeing the light, but I love messy characters who are “just trying to live” like the character Josh says even if they muck it up sometimes. This reminded me of Strong’s previous novel, “Want,” because even though it often felt bleak, I felt an undercurrent of hopefulness that buoyed me to the end because I still ultimately trusted the characters to figure something out. It did take me a while for me to get the names sorted out and remember which kid belonged to which parents, and which spouses were a pair, etc.

Thanks, NetGalley!

Lynn Steiger Strong writes the story of three siblings and their families coming together for the first Christmas after the death of their mother. The family gathers to celebrate the holiday and to discuss the disposition of the family home in Florida. Though not a lot happens in this book, a potential tragedy unites the family. Spending this time as a group helps them to understand each other better. The two brothers, their sister, and their spouses live very different lifestyles but share the same values. I very much enjoyed this book. I thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Lynn Steger Strong's writing in Flight is almost poetic. She is able to take the emotions of all of the characters and express them to her audience with such grace, imagery and passion. As three families come together to celebrate their first Christmas with out their matriarch, tensions between family members rise and marriage secrets that are better left unspoken come to light. Each of the couple must put their judgements aside and come together in order to help a local woman and her daughter.

As the reader, I was able to easily understand where each couple was coming from and recognized pieces of my own marital experience in the writing. Flight is a short read but the perspectives are meaningful. Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books for the opportunity to review this novel.

In Flight, by Lynn Steger Strong, siblings Kate, Henry, and Martin gather together with their respective spouses Josh, Alice, and Tess and their children at Henry and Alice’s home in Upstate New York for the first family Christmas since the death of their mother Helen. As is true of most (most likely all) extended families, tensions roil beneath the placid (and not so placid) surface, and that holds true here as well.

The main tension driver is Kate and Josh’s desire to move into Helen’s home rather than selling the house and dividing the money up equally amongst the siblings. Though they keep this aspect to themselves, a sense of urgency underlies the request as Josh has recently lost a big chunk of their savings due to some investment mistakes. Beyond the family disagreements over the disposition of Helen’s house, other areas of anxiety and conflict include difficult children (several with behavioral diagnoses), drastically different views of parenting, Henry and Alice’s inability to become parents, Henry’s concern about climate change (represented by his art), Martins mysterious problem with a female student at the college he teaches at, Alice’s unprofessional focus on the teen daughter of one of her social work clients, different definitions of success, and of course the siblings’ grief as well as the numerous issues that arise in any family with decades of shared history. Along with the family plot, a smaller subplot focuses on Alice’s clients — Quinn, a recovering drug addict, and her daughter Madeleine, as they try to put their lives back together.

This isn’t a novel for anyone looking for car chases, things exploding, violence, screaming fights, etc. While a turn takes place toward the end that greatly raises the stakes and the tension, what Strong delves so wonderfully deeply into here are individual characters and writing masterfully about sibling relations, parent-child relations, and spousal relations. None of these feel like tropes or stock characters/relationships. Each feels unique and fully lived in. The same holds true for Strong’s depiction of grief, which is not a general malaise shared amongst the siblings but is portrayed as multi-faceted dependent on their singular relationships with Helen and their own current situations.

The prose is sharp, as are the insights, making Flight a lovely quiet novel of humanity and an ending we were always holding toward but which still feels wholly, beautifully earned. Highly recommended.

I received an advance copy which I started yesterday & finished today on a plane. Tears were steaming! Have already preordered a copy for a friend! Lynn Steger Strong captured the perfect mix of the flawed beauty yet still sustainable aspect of adult sibling relationships. I highlighted the parts about the mom, Helen. We have raised four kids and I love them all so very much and one is in NY & another in Nashville and two are in CA and I have found myself carving times for us all to be together much in the same way Helen did. The author’s book is a Monet amongst the many novels it will sit next to on the bookshelves of libraries & bookstores. I will tell all I know to read this!!!

I'm super curious to see how this book is marketed. Coming out around the holidays with that lovely seasonal cover, I can see it being pushed as a family drama to read while you spend time with you family. The perfect holiday book. But the story itself could be hard for many people, particularly around the holidays. I can see people picking this up as a holiday read and being disappointed by the "dark" story.

Of course, it's not dark so much as depressingly real. As she showed with WANT, Strong is very good at depicting the anxieties and struggles of upper middle class white Americans.

Here, three grown siblings and their spouses gather for Christmas, the first one since the death of Helen, the matriarch who kept them all together. They are dealing with their grief and also the stickiness of inheritance, emotional, of course, but also practical. There's a house that needs to be disposed of.

I liked how over the course of the book Helen transforms from a saintly figure to a real woman with faults like everyone else. I liked the sibling relationships -- sometimes sharp, sometimes tender, sometimes clueless despite their closeness. I didn't like the added family, a mother and her daughter, that the central family is tangled up with. There already are so many characters and stories, this addition felt unnecessary. Also, Strong sometimes gets too heavy-handed, or maybe just too insecure. Her writing is strong enough, she's showing me enough, that I don't need sentences that say explicitly X was jealous of Y, for instance. She should trust her readers more.

Liked but didn't love this one. Definitely know some people for whom this book will hit just right.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

FLIGHT by Lynn Steger Strong is an impeccably told family drama from beginning to end. At page one, I was gripped by the well-developed characters struggling with real issues. Three couples gather in upstate New York to celebrate Christmas at one of their sibling’s houses. It is their first time together since their beloved matriarch died and they are each unsure of their footing without her. They descend upon Henry and Alice’s home, who eagerly await their nieces and nephews, with no children of their own after having endured the heartbreak of infertility. Both artists, Alice has given up a creative career and turned to social work in her small town, forming a strong connection with her first client. Meanwhile, Henry is obsessed with climate change and his artwork reflects what he hopes will preserve our slowly eroding planet. Martin and Tess hail from Manhattan with two kids. He is a bit long-suffering, keeping matters of his university position under wraps. Tess is wound tight from her high-powered career as an attorney, and has trouble letting go of work, even on holiday. As well as micro-managing an overly active son whom she thinks needs her attention 24/7. Coming up from Richmond are Josh and Kate. Kate deeply misses her mother. She is determined to maintain tradition by keeping up with family recipes and picture-perfect photos and is strategizing how to strike up a conversation amongst her siblings and sisters-in-law about their mother’s home in Florida, their only inheritance, knowing this will be a prickly subject. Josh, who does his own thing, seems to bring out the worst in everyone. Their twin boys and a girl are perceived by Tess as instigators in wreaking havoc.

As the families settle into the house, it’s as if the tension of their shared history is slowly unpacked.

Maddie, the girl whose case Alice has been assigned, was taken away from her mother, Quinn, and put into foster care when her mother was caught using drugs. Alice keeps a close watch, perhaps too close, and when a crisis occurs, the families become entangled in each other’s lives.

FLIGHT is an intimate look at familial struggles and beautifully captures the everyday, the chaos of life and its ripple effects, characters with relatable emotions, and demonstrates how art permeates life, all told with skilled suspense. Steger Strong is a master storyteller and we will look back at this novel as succinctly capturing this period in time. A thoroughly enjoyable read that I encourage anyone who loves a good family drama to pick up right away.

Thank you to NetGalley, Mariner Books, and the author for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This family drama centers on 3 siblings and their first holiday together after the family matriarch has passed. In question: the familial home and who will get it.

I LOVE a good family drama but there are so many characters (siblings + spouses + kids + a tangentially related other family) and the character development to differentiate between characters is really minuscule (and they don’t seem unique), so it’s hard to differentiate and I felt so lost it was frustrating.

Disappointed I didn’t love and it had great potential. Maybe a family tree could have helped?

Thanks to Mariner Books and Netgalley for the ARC.

I read alot of hype about this book and I kept reading till the end but after I finished I thought, Eh? Written well but felt the story was weak. Thanks for the advance preview.

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 4.5/5

A family drama focussed on three siblings and their families on the first Christmas after their mother’s death. Each is experiencing some disappointment / pressure in life and each twirls within their own constant inner monologue while engaging with each other in a kind of complex dance with needs, desires, and irritations constantly up for rebalancing. Martin, the eldest, is on temporary leave after having made some ill-advised statements to the wrong people at his educational institution; his wife Tess is the practical one, a lawyer who is in a constant state of worry and irritation; Kate is a housewife and mother, married to Josh who has managed to run through the inheritance they were living on; Henry is an artist obsessed with the climate, and his wife Alice somehow shifted from artist to social worker and now finds herself over-attached to one of her charges. When that particular charge disappears on Christmas Eve, each individual gets a jolt that drives him or her to a deeper understanding of his or her own life.

While slow at times, the book contains a lot of insight through each person’s reflections coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and situations. An enjoyable read.

In Lynn Steger Strong’s taut domestic drama Flight (Mariner, $27.99, 9780063135147), Christmas is a time of tension and healing for three adult siblings in the wake of their mother’s death.

Helen was a formidable figure by all accounts. Equal parts homemaker, matriarch, and intellectual, she stood out in their Florida town and provided the charismatic fulcrum around which family life pivoted. Even after her children had long left the family home behind, she wielded strong influence. In their first holiday after her death, Helen’s fractious family has gathered at the large house son Henry shares with his wife, and they’re flailing.

For a start, Helen died suddenly, and without a will and now they’re fighting over the house.
But money and property are only the start of their issues. No one is at ease in Helen’s absence; everyone is worried and hiding some perceived shortcoming. The youngest sibling, Kate, a stay-at-home mom of three, chose a similar path to Helen, but entirely lacks her confidence. The jury is still out on her husband Josh, who’s dedicated his time this holiday to the seemingly sisyphean task of building an igloo for the kids to play in. With money trouble looming, Kate’s focus is firmly trained on the big favor she wants to ask of her brothers. Elder brother Martin is a professor worried about job stability in the wake of some unbecoming and potentially ruinous behavior. His wife Tess is a well-paid and perennially anxious lawyer, who is neither confident being with her kids nor comfortable when they’re out of her sight. Though she’s judgmental with Kate, even Tess was in thrall to Helen’s charms.

Middle child Henry is a dedicated artist who does interesting work to document climate change, which no one else inside (or perhaps even outside of) the family understands or much values. Henry’s wife Alice, a beautiful, multiracial artist turned social worker from a well-to do family, and the host of this gathering at the house in Upstate New York that she inherited from her grandmother, is still grieving her own maternal prospects after multiple miscarriages. Alice dreads being left alone with any of her in-laws.

As a reader, it’s easy to relate to Alice’s trepidation. Though every sibling and spouse is nuanced and multidimensional, even on paper, being in the presence of Helen’s clan can seem overwhelming. At the same time, the myriad fissures and fractures and worry are what makes this family drama feel real. A significant side plot involving one of Alice’s more troubled clients provides a key rallying point for Helen’s family and much-needed breathing room.

Flight
by Lynn Steger Strong
Pub Date: November 8, 2022
Mariner Books

Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book. With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as "a defining novel of our age" (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.

This book is perfect for those that love reading about families dealing with grief and processing it together.
3 stars

This book is perfect for those that love reading about families dealing with grief and processing it together. The author did a beautiful job and I will be recommending it to others.