Module 4: Ask the Passengers

Summary:
Astrid Jones is a teenage girl struggling with her sexual orientation. She lives with her father, mother, and sister in Unity Valley, Pennsylvania. Unity Valley is a small, conservative town that stands in stark contrast to the New York city life of Astrid's childhood. Feeling trapped by her own uncertainties about who is and is not okay to love and what that means, Astrid works through her feelings by silently sending love to anonymous airplane passengers that fly by overhead and by stealing secret kisses from her unofficial girlfriend, Dee. The story unfolds one awkward, difficult moment at a time and Astrid stumbles to decide who she is and who she loves. Her family, her peers, and her community are forced to confront the realities of Astrid's identity. The ride isn't always smooth, but there are more who love her than she maybe realized.

King, A.S. (2012). Ask the passengers. New York: Little Brown.

Review: School Library Journal

The Plot: Astrid lives in a small town where everyone knows, or thinks they know, everyone’s business. Everyone judges. So Astrid keeps some things to herself: like that her father is smoking pot. Like how she and her younger sister Ellis are no longer close. Like she’s sure her mother dislikes her.

Like Astrid has been kissing Dee, a girl from work. For months.

Astrid doesn’t even tell her two close friends at school, Kristina and Justin, which is both amusing and sad because Astrid knows their secret, that the popular, well-liked couple are not really a couple, both are gay, and both are covering for each other because being gay in their small,  perfect town would be impossible. Besides, just because Astrid like kissing Dee, it doesn’t mean she’s gay.

So Astrid plays a game, giving love to strangers, staring up at planes and sending love. And the passengers flying over Pennsylvania wonder why suddenly they feel hope, or love, or calmness.

The Good: Oh, such a complicated, complex book, much like Astrid and her family.

Astrid and her family relocated from New York City years before, and A.S. King tells us only what Astrid knows, only what we need to know, but there are threads and hints of things going on beyond what we are told. King also respects the reader to not tidy this story up with a bow. Oh, there is a resolution, yes, and I felt so happy and hopeful finishing this book you’d think Astrid was sending me love from it’s pages.

It’s  not just that somethings remain unknown or unresolved; for example, is the mother agoraphobic? Did they leave New York City for reasons other than a yearning for small town life? So, too, are the relationships not easily resolved. Rather, they remain as messy as they were at the start of the book, just messy in different ways and with more truth-telling and less secrets.

Astrid is struggling not so much with her feelings for Dee, but, rather, what those feelings mean. Is she gay? One of the things I really like about 

Ask the Passengers is Astrid’s process, not just internally (what she feels) but externally (what she does.) There is reference to a boy Astrid briefly dated (her mother plotted against the relationship because she didn’t like the boy), but not much about that. Astrid isn’t so much uncomfortable with being gay as she is uncomfortable with a label, because, good or bad, she’s seen in her small town the damage any label does to someone, how it limits them.

Dee is a bit more experienced than Astrid, even though they are the same age, and I loved how their dynamic worked. It’s the complications of their being together and it being hidden, but also Astrid not always being on the same page as Dee about just how physical the two should be. It’s awkward and honest and tender, and sometimes Dee is a bit aggressive, but Astrid is no pushover and vocalizes her wants and needs including what she doesn’t want. I loved seeing a couple work through what they were both physically ready for, using words as well as touch and kissing.

I said how Astrid sends love to the passengers she sees in the planes flying above her. I love that, and that image of Astrid, lying on a picnic table and looking up, up not see the planes as escape as others would but instead to share love. To be positive. And I love that every so often, we meet one of those passengers who are on the receiving end of Astrid’s love: where they are going, what is happening, that the burst of love helps in a way Astrid never knows about.

Yes, this is a Favorite Book Read in 2013.

Burns, E. (2013). Review: Ask the passengers. School Library Journal, 59(2), 53.

Impressions: 
From the first page of Ask the Passengers, I was hooked. The voice of the protagonist, Astrid Jones, and her quirky habit of sending love to strangers is a poignant, touching element in literature and even rarer in the world outside literature:
“Every airplane, no matter how far it is up there, I send love to it. 
It’s a good game because I can’t lose.
I do it everywhere now.
I don’t care if they love me back.
This isn’t reciprocal.
It’s an outpouring.
Because if I give it all away, then no one can control it.
Because if I give it all away, I’ll be free.”
(Ask the Passengers, p.1)

The beauty of Astrid sending out love to those around her is only enhanced when we learn that Astrid is one of two children in a dysfunctional, disconnected household where she feels unloved. To make matters worse, the ever-present difficulty of every teen to establish their identity is weighing heavily on Astrid as she struggles to determine her sexual orientation.

King sheds light on the heart of someone questioning in a way that illuminates the issue of homosexuality without making a spectacle of it. She beautifully weaves in internal dialogue and raw moments where you feel as if you see the heart of Astrid displayed on her sleeve.  Astrid is a thinker, a philosopher, who questions the motives of herself and those around her in a way that’s insightful yet relatable for teens and adults alike. As you experience Astrid’s intermittent clarity and confusion in turn throughout the story, you deeply feel for her and all the while want to give her a hug or a slap, you never can decide. To engage a reader so thoroughly is a triumph by King, for sure.

At the end of the story, I felt filled with hope for Astrid and for the world around us that struggles to move forward in a positive way but not always sure how to do so. Ask the Passengers makes you feel like that’s okay. That maybe we don’t always have the right answers or solutions, but loving each other despite the unknowing is what will carry us through. 

Library Use: 

Ask the Passengers could be used as part of a display that promotes teaching, history, and understanding of equal civil rights for all people. The display could be part of a monthly focus that highlights certain information and where to find it in different types of texts and literature available in the library. The books available in the display could be correlated to matching areas/sections in the collection to encourage students to read more material from them.