It’s a Friday night, and you’re all alone at home. Your friends can’t hang out since they’re stuck with either chores or babysitting duties, and you’re parents suddenly felt the need to reconnect with their youth and decided to go clubbing. So you go with the flow and turn on the television to check who they killed this time on The Walking Dead. Without notice, a walker turns and looks your way. As you jump out of your skin, the lights go out, and you just noticed that it’s raining. You’re not scared! You’re not scared…it’s just a little power outage. The lights will come back on shortly. And then that’s when you hear it. A slow, silent, bone-chilling knock on the front door makes your heart beat ten times faster than The Road Runner could run. Being the ever curious cat that you are, you go by the window to check who it is, and you swear you’ve just shit out your heart. A man wearing a smiling theater mask stares right back at you as he raises his axe just inches away from your head.
How many times have we watched a movie like this? Or read a book that incorporated the ever favored theme: thriller? Well, just yesterday, I had my first real taste of a thriller novel courtesy of April Henry and her book titled Learning to Fly.
First of all, I’ve never been a big fan of the horror or thriller genre like so many book addicts out there. Yet, I was in desperate need of an exciting fast paced book, seeing as how I still had a long way to go before fully recovering from a repulsing, vomit-inducing romance novel I’d read just weeks before. Whom else would I go to to complete such a task but my most trusted book adviser: my librarian. Now, I have to be totally and completely honest here. We had a much heated debate before I accepted the fact that maybe widening my reading scope might not be as horrid as I thought.
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.
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(Summary courtesy of Goodreads)
Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about being bored or horrified with this book since I felt a connection with the protagonist, Free, from the time she decided to take the drug lord’s money and the abused wife’s identity to recreate a new life for herself. I felt the fear she possibly went through when she felt the handsome cop who keeps coming around to her new address might be on her tail or when she figured the guy who kidnapped her must be the drug lord coming back for his money. I had to admit that Free had smarts unlike the typical characters that are normally found in thriller novels; she hid parts of the money in places no one would ever think of looking and she thought of ingenious ways to escape from her captor and succeeded. I absolutely loved the other characters too, although some of them were not totally realistic, they were quite entertaining.
However, the way in which the book was written felt like the characters had a little too much insight into what each other were thinking and it kind of cheapened the natural flow of the story. I also felt like the writer was in a rush to finish the ending since the scene just switched instantly from Free being rescued to her being in the hospital.
Overall, it was quite an interesting read and has definitely convinced me to explore more thriller novels. Maybe even horror.
Rating: 7.5/10
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Book Info:
- Publisher: Minatour Books (May 7, 2002)
- Length: 288 pages, Paperback
- Series: N/A
- Source: Local Library
- Genre: Young Adult, Thriller
- Completed: April 2013
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