Review: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King

Title: Ask the Passengers

Author: A.S. King

Publisher: Little, Brown BFYR

Publication Date: 10.23.2012

Pages: 296

Genre: Contemporary, LGBT

Series: No

Source: Finished copy from publisher

Rating: B

Summary (from Goodreads):

Astrid Jones desperately wants to confide in someone, but her mother's pushiness and her father's lack of interest tell her they're the last people she can trust. Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions . . . like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.

As her secret relationship becomes more intense and her friends demand answers, Astrid has nowhere left to turn. She can't share the truth with anyone except the people at thirty thousand feet, and they don't even know she's there. But little does Astrid know just how much even the tiniest connection will affect these strangers' lives--and her own--for the better.

Review:

Ask the Passengers is exactly the type of book you think you’re getting when you read the summary: It’s a book about a teenage girl who is trying to sort out her life and figure out who she is and who she wants to be. And yes, it has the added twist of the main character coming to terms with her sexual orientation.

I was a little surprised at how ordinary Astrid felt. Not that I expected her to be some dramatic, overblown character, but I felt like there was nothing spectacular that set her apart from a lot of the other teenage girls I read about in contemporary novels. Her parents don’t get her—her mom is more concerned with her sister and her dad is fairly oblivious. That just felt formulaic to me. Aside from the lesbian angle to the story, Astrid felt like any other girl dealing with feelings for that special someone, but unsure of how to express them.

This book is all about emotion. I expected that going in, and A.S. King really does a nice job of expressing those emotions. She phrases things splendidly, and I truly enjoy her writing style. The story flowed nicely. It wasn’t overly long or excessively wordy, which could have been an easy pitfall to stumble into.

Overall, this book was exactly what I expected, but that’s what disappointed me. I was hoping for something that would wow me. Something I could get really excited about and sink into. The setting is a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, but again, that just felt so done already. I feel like I’ve read variations of this novel before, but the way King wrote it kept me engaged to the end.

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