Review: The Book of Flying

     Keith Miller's The Book of Flying, a fantasy novel for grown-ups, is a magical experience.  To say that the language in which the story is told is "poetic" would be an understatement.  The language in this novel is alive.  The best way for me to illustrate this is to briefly quote a few passages:

     "Dreams are the soul of the imagination, the slender and evasive revenants of the shells we erect as our dwellings.  We build our shells from the sand of our ground bones, mortared with our very blood, and we imagine we fence the dreams away but we only fence them in." (Page 88)

     "Conversations in the flesh are the first drafts toward the later conversations of the mind, where words and ideas are sorted and elaborated, recast." (119)

     "They dragged from fecund and roiling brains long daggers of sentences, brandishing them like challenges, or flung out single words more precious, more enduring than jewels, scattering them across the floor." (143)

     The Book of Flying is a book that loves books, loves words, loves poetry, loves dreams.  It is the story of Pico, the librarian in a city by the sea where people don't read his books.  He loves Sisi, a young woman with wings.  She is enamoured of Pico's poems, but though Pico's parents were winged, he was born wingless, and Sisi cannot love a man who can't fly over the sea with her at dusk. 

      Pico hears of a book that will teach him how to get wings, and goes off in search of it.  His journey is an epic.  He meets outrageous characters, including a robber queen, a minotaur, and a rabbit who catalogues the forest.  In the end, he finds The Book of Flying-- his own story, and the very book you are reading. 

     The most beautiful chapter is the one titled "The City in the Mountains."  In it, Pico's heart opens to an unlikely group of people, and we travel with the ups and downs of his heart.  The stories in this chapter are exquisite.  The following chapter, "The Dark Castle," has a character who is a cannibal.  Miller's writing ekes a terrible beauty from even this grim subject matter.

     At its heart, though, The Book of Flying is a book of love, and you will fall in love with it.