Learning to Fly: A Thriller [Hardcover]

April Henry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2002

Nineteen-year-old Free Meeker has a shaved head, a nose ring, and a tattoo of Chinese characters around her biceps. She has a career, if you can call it that, as a pet groomer. And she has just learned that she is pregnant, and that her boyfriend is a two-timing bastard.

Then a disastrous highway pile-up erroneously adds her name to its list of victims - and hands Free a chance for a new life. In the chaos of the fiery accident, she acquired the identity papers of the hitchhiker who is mistaken for her - plus a gym bag filled with $740,000 in drug money that otherwise would have been burned up. Go, Free, go!

Free sets out to transform herself into Lydia, the sweet-faced girl whose identity she has assumed. Raised by aging hippies, Free has always secretly longed to be more "normal," to try shaving her underarms instead of her head. Now she has a chance to make herself over.

But Free doesn't know that two men are hot on her trail. One man wants the money back. If he doesn't get it soon, he knows he will end up dead. The other man wants his wife back. He doesn't know the real Lydia died in the accident, on the run from his pathological abuse. Now he is determined to "teach her a lesson" - even if the lesson is fatal.

As Free/Lydia settles into a new life full of possibilities, she is completely unaware that it is threatened by resourceful pursuers who are closing in on her.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Penzler Pick, April 2002: An exceptionally gripping opening sets the pace for this suspenseful and original thriller from northwest writer April Henry. For those readers old enough to remember the classic 1960s New Wave French film Weekend, it will be easy enough to picture in the mind's eye the panoramic landscape of a massive, chain reaction-induced highway traffic disaster.

For others, Henry's vivid and nightmarish 14-page description is more than up to the task.

In Learning to Fly, the pileup is triggered by a freak eastern Oregon dust storm. Nineteen-year-old heroine Free Meeker is headed home--though not exactly rushing--to tell her laid-back, nonjudgmental, aging hippie parents that she's pregnant. Even more unexpected than the horrific 52-car collision from which she's walked away is the fact that the next day, before she can contact her family, the newspaper reports her among the fatalities.

"She didn't feel like a dead person--but she didn't feel real, either. Wearing only a borrowed muumuu, she was sitting cross-legged on a sagging double bed in a room at the Stay-A-While Motor Inn, three blocks from the hospital. During the night Free has gotten only snatches of sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw dead people, cars cartwheeling through the air, the orange bloom of fire. Over and over again, she has flinched awake, hearing the squeal of tearing metal and the terrible boom of impacts in her dreams."

This set of circumstances is hardly enough to give Henry's plot the dense weight of dread it soon manifests. The body identified as Free's turns out to be that of a hitchhiking woman whose husband is a single-minded sadist-abuser who soon vengefully targets Free as his missing wife's rescuer. Moreover, the suitcase handed to Free by a suffering young man--he soon succumbs to his injuries--as she fled the scene of the disaster is revealed to contain nearly a million dollars that belongs to some impatient and unforgiving drug dealers.

This is a substantially loaded deck, and Free's intuitively self-preserving ability (after all, she has another life to consider) to play her own hand in response is what makes the novel, Henry's fourth, such compulsive reading. A classic tale of an innocent on the lam, Learning to Fly has the kind of plot that would have made Hitchcock smile in evil anticipation of its cinematic possibilities. And it's the kind of story that makes A Simple Plan by comparison look... simple. --Otto Penzler

From Publishers Weekly

After three books (the Agatha- and Anthony-nominee Circles of Confusion, etc.) featuring an amateur sleuth whose day job involves making sure people don't create any nasty messages with their vanity license plates, Henry has produced a stand-alone thriller that is far darker and uglier than any novel in her Claire Montrose series. A gruesome freeway pileup (52 vehicles, 14 deaths) has unexpected benefits for a young woman whose hippie parents named her Free: a new identity plus a bag containing $750,000 in drug money. When a passenger in her car, killed in the carnage, is mistakenly identified as Free, suddenly our pregnant, unemployed heroine has a way out of her problems and the money to finance it. She becomes Lydia, and assembles a new life in what she believes is the safe obscurity of another woman's persona. But then two dangerous men start to track her: a vicious drug dealer, who wants his money back, and Lydia's sicko husband, who wants his punching-bag wife back. In tone, mood and structure, this is a major departure from the Claire Montrose adventures, and fans may not forgive the author for depriving them of their favorite guessing game (try deciphering 6ULDV8, or CUNQRT). The harrowing accident scene (based loosely on a real event) that opens the story is very strong, but its promise goes largely unfulfilled by a fair-to-middling middle and then a predictable ending. All told this is but a passable thriller that lacks the originality readers of Henry's earlier books have come to expect. 2BAD. NYSTRY, but NTKWT.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; 1st edition (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312290527
• ISBN-13: 978-0312290528
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,086,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write mysteries and thrillers. I live in Portland, Oregon with my family.

When I was 12, I sent a short story about a six-foot tall frog who loved peanut butter to Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He took it to lunch and showed it to the editor of an international children's magazine - and she asked to publish the story! (For no money, which might have been a warning about how hard it is to make a living writing.)

My dream of writing went dormant until I was in my 30s, working at a corporate job, and started writing books on the side. Those first few years are now thankfully a blur. Now I'm very lucky to make a living doing what I love. I have written ten novels for adults and teens, with more on the way. My books have gotten starred reviews, been picked for Booksense, translated into four languages, been named to state reading lists, and short-listed for the Oregon Book Award. And Face of Betrayal, which I co-wrote with Lis Wiehl, was on the New York Times bestseller list for four weeks in 2009.

I also review YA literature and mysteries and thrillers for the Oregonian, and have written articles for both The Writer and Writers Digest.

Heart of Ice (co-written with Lis Wiehl) came out in early April. And a teen thriller, The Night She Disappeared, will be published in January 2012.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A superior character driven thriller, February 25, 2004

By 

Larry Gandle (Tampa, Florida) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning to Fly: A Thriller (Hardcover)

Free Meeker, a nineteen-year-old free spirit and soon to be an unwed mother is involved in a fatal pile up on a highway blinded by a dust storm. She survives but a fellow passenger, a hitchhiker, named Lydia, is killed. Lydia was running away from an abusive relationship with her husband. After finding a gym bag filled with drug money, Free decides to assume Lydia's identity and run away to start a new life for herself and her, as yet, unborn child. Of course, life is never so simple. Looking for Lydia is her enraged husband and Don Cannon, a drug dealer who desperately needs the money that Free has found or he will, himself, be killed.
April Henry has written a stand-alone novel with the subtext of "a thriller", Actually, LEARNING TO FLY should be more properly called a novel of suspense. April's novel is character driven while most true thrillers would be considered plot driven. The difference, as I see it, between the two is that the pacing would be much more rapid with the plot driven thrillers. The character driven thrillers must, by definition, move slower to allow the reader the time to get to know the character. April succeeds in creating an interesting yet sympathetic figure in Free Meeker. There are some character motivations that were not completely explained such as why a young policeman would be interested in an unwed pregnant woman. Otherwise, LEARNING TO FLY is a well-written novel that should appeal to readers on the beach or in the air. Personally, I would like to see a bit of a tighter plot but this one certainly succeeds as is.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Thrill Ride, April 13, 2010

By 

Jana Greer (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning to Fly: A Thriller (Hardcover)

I picked this up because I am originally from Oregon and get a kick out of reading books based in or about my home state. I didn't know what it would be about nor have I read any of April Henry's other books, so I blindly started reading the story of Free Meeker.

Free is a teenager who makes her living as a pet groomer, she shaves her head and is (obviously by her name) the child of hippie parents. Free is also dating a not so nice guy who is cheating on her. Things don't seem to be going so great for her when she finds out that she is pregnant. She decides to drive to Portland to tell her parents.

The five-hour drive from Medford to Portland is usually uneventful, but on this day Free picks up a hitchhiker, a woman named Lynda, and there's a dust storm that causes a horrible pileup on the freeway. Lynda is killed in the accident. Free swipes her wallet and then meets a man who is desperate to find his bag, so she helps him. They find the bag, but then the man dies.

So what's in the bag? A whole lot of money!

Free discovers herself in a unique situation. Her name is on the list of those who perished on the freeway, she has a wallet with Lynda's identification and a bag full of money ($740,000 to be exact). With not much to leave behind, she decides she'll take this opportunity to reinvent herself, buy a wig, get an apartment.

Only there are people who want that money back. And a man who is pissed that his wife Lynda left him. They have their sights on Free and are hot on her tail.

Oh wee! This book is a thrill ride! I had such a good time reading it and rooting for Free to make a clean getaway with all that cash. If this is any indication of what April Henry's other books are like, I'll be buying them as soon as possible.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I vividly remember this book 2 years later, January 30, 2004

By 

Prangster (West Linn, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Learning to Fly: A Thriller (Hardcover)

If you are a fan of Henry's cozies, this is not quite the right book for you - but it does have a happy (kinda, sorta) ending. The writing is crisp, vivid, and effective. Oregon actually experienced the kind of dust-storm disaster so horrifically described in the opening. All of the characters are a little larger than life, which is why they are so memorable, including the City of Portland. I remember this book, enjoyed it a lot and hope you do too.