Fly Away

By Nora Rock

After a member of her competitive cheerleading team is injured in practice, sixteen-year-old Marnie is asked to be a flyer-the most coveted role in cheerleading. The Soar Starlings team has a real shot at the provincial championship, and Marnie has only a few weeks to prepare. But as she scrambles to polish her lifts and throws, Marnie's personal life begins to unravel. First, her boyfriend of two years breaks up with her, and then her best friend Arielle, captain of the Starlings, disappears during a team trip to Toronto. As Marnie struggles to adjust to being both a flyer and the team's new captain, she realizes that, to be a leader, you have to let go of old alliances to make room in your life for new ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554693146

Nora Rock

Nora Rock is a college professor and freelance writer. The author of a dozen textbooks for high school, community college and university, Nora specializes in writing about the law for non-lawyers like police officers, social workers and health-care professionals. She lives in Ajax, Ontario, with her husband and two sons.

Reviews for Fly Away

[edwinkort · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lekker leesbaar boek. Mooi plot.

[inigomontoya_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Flyaway is a pedestrian thriller which tells the tale of the 1978 hunt for an airplane presumed lost during the 1936 London to Cape Town Air Race. Most of the story is set in and around the Sahara Desert as protagonist security chief Max Stafford searches for the obsessed son of the pilot and the plane. Max is aided by Lucas Byrne, an ex-pat American who has lived in the area for the last thirty-five years, after deserting during the war. I found the twists predictable, although that is not necessarily a fair conclusion. I read the book many years ago, but remembered nothing of it when I re-read it for the "Go Review That Book!" game. That it's so forgettable is telling. Save for the interesting descriptions of the desert and the Tuareg, one of the nomadic tribes of the region, there's not much to recommend it.One of the main problems for me was the character of Max Stafford. He seemed to serve so little purpose to the actual story except to be the means by which everything is put together at the end. The other issue I had with the book is one that stuns me.I am notoriously non-PC. I don't want every story to be served up with the "right" attitude to sensitive issues. I certainly dislike the trend of books being judged out of their time and context, leading to claims that great works of their day are devalued because of attitudes that don't pass modern muster. So colour me shocked that I found this book irritatingly colonial. It was written in 1978, but it smacks of the fifties. Even the introduction of Bryne, the best character in the book, is disappointing in its reliance on having a white, and thus in some way more credible, guide. I rarely find offence in such things, but even I was affected by stuff like this:To a character bruised from having been beaten: "Better not go out into the streets just yet. Someone from the Race Relations Board might get you for trying to cross the colour line."With reference to the main post office in Algiers, as if Arabic architecture didn't have it's own long and proud history: "...an Eastern attempt to emulate the reverential and cathedral-like atmosphere affected by the major British banks."On his attempts to speak German: "No foreigner minds you speaking his language badly providing you make the attempt. Excepting the French, of course."On reflection, that last one makes me laugh.