Sherman Alexie's Flight, his first novel in ten years, is a work of speculative fiction narrated by a troubled foster kid nicknamed Zits. Abandoned by his Spokane Indian father and orphaned when his mother dies of cancer, Zits spends most of his childhood being abused by a rotating cast of foster parents. But as an awkwardly insightful narrator, he recognizes the irrationality of his anger while in the midst of attacking a foster mother. He is brilliant and explosive, an "orphan meteor."

In juvenile detention, Zits teams up with a teenage revolutionary named Justice who encourages him to re-create the Ghost Dance by shooting up a bank. It is this act of cathartic violence that sends Zits on his journey through time and space, alternately inhabiting the body of a 19th-century Indian tracker, a Lakota child at Custer's last stand, and, finally, his present-day self, in a redemptive arc.

Zits spends much of the novel trying to maintain his sanity and survive nightmarish historical scenarios by tossing out factoid-laced quips distilled from his History Channel addiction: "Custer is a crazy egomaniac who thinks he is going to be president of the United States. Custer is one of the top two or three dumb asses in American History." Although the narrator's story of abuse and alienation can be dark, he doesn't shy from asking the "big questions": Is violence ever justified? Are any of our collective heroes real? Is revenge a circle inside a circle inside a circle?

Alexie uses a daring conceit to implicate our naiveté toward the cyclical nature of violence and revenge. Shielded from the realities of war, clinging to the worn tropes of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, he posits that we have lost touch with the inherent nihilism of conflict. In Flight, Alexie forces the reader to view the players close-up and to witness the acts of personal betrayal and heroism against the landscape of larger political forces, blowing us about and hopefully returning us to something that resembles home.

-Alexios Moore