Landing Gear

What happened to this book? It really had me excited to read it. It did not end up that way for me. It started out with Yacub falling out of the sky onto Harriet's car. She offers to take him home with her. Then the story flashes back in time. I know the author was trying to give me insight into everyone's lives and how they got to where they are now in their lives. However, it took 122 pages to tell this story. I felt nothing for anyone except for Yacub. He was the only one with an interesting story to share. Harriet was depressing, her husband is unforgettable, and her son is a brat. If it was not for the fact, of how this book was layed out by the first half being about the past and me not jumping ahead then I would have given up on the book a while ago.

When I finally got to the second half of the story, it started to get interesting. However it did not last long. It kind of jumped around and still none of the characters were interesting. So I skimmed the second half of the story. I do like the author's imagination to be able to dream up a story from a newspaper article. Yes, this story is loosely based around an actual true event. Someone did actually fall from the sky as a stow away in a plane and landed on a car. That person did not survive.


Landing Gear expands upon the story first developed in Kate’s work of digital multimedia, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel.  Her novel, The Mistress of Nothing, won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.  Her digital fiction project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes, reaching online audiences around the world, and she is currently working on Letter to an Unknown Soldier, a digital memorial marking the centenary of World War I.