Flying in Place
Susan Palwick
Tor, May 2005, $11.95, 189 pages, ISBN: 0765313863
reviewed by Harriet Klausner

In Wisconsin, everyone in the small town thinks highly of surgeon Dr. Stewart Gray, who dines with the elite. However, the much-adulated Dr. Gray hides a dark side from public view. Every night after his wife an English teacher falls asleep he visits his twelve years old daughter Emma to have his sexual way with her. Uncomfortable and with no place to escape, Emma flies away in her mind though her body remains in place. On her mental trips she begins meeting her sister Ginny who at ten years old died long before Emma was born.

Emma becomes more withdrawn with every nocturnal visit as her only friend is her sibling's spirit. School nurse Halloran notices the bruises on Emma's body and the negative trends of withdrawal and grades collapsing; she soon concludes that the epitome of upper crust society Stewart was assaulting his child. Still it is hard to prove until Emma's Aunt Donna arrives; she knows the real Dr. Stewart Gray not the image and believes history is repeating itself.

FLYING IN PLACE is a deep thought provoking reprint of an insightful very dark early 1990s tale. The key characters are purposely left as two-dimensional. This approach enables the reader to decide whether the two sisters are actually flying together or just a defense mechanism of the preadolescent, but also restricts the cast as women are courageous or victims and men nice or sinful. Black and white with no gray, FLYING IN PLACE grips the reader from the moment the mask falls off of Stewart and never eases the emotional shock until Donna confronts him.