If a book takes place during Christmas, is it a Christmas book? It all depends on how you feel about this Christian holiday. Is it bittersweet or haunting? Is it a time of good memories and making more of them? Is it hopeful and inspiring? If you are looking for a mix of bittersweet, haunting and ultimately hopeful, then yes. FLIGHT is a Christmas story.

Henry, Kate and Martin’s mother has recently passed away. They are spending Christmas for the first time in snowy upstate New York instead of bright, warm Florida, where she lived. The siblings, their spouses and their children (for those lucky enough to have them) are still mourning and unsure of what their family will look like after these holiday celebrations. After a period of togetherness, Henry, Kate and Martin are once again engaged in their own needs and wants, and individual sorrows and longings. Merry Christmas, everybody!

"Perhaps there is a lot to be said for a family drama set at Christmastime that opens itself up to interpretation in a larger mindset. It is constantly luring us with the possibility of disaster at every turn, and Strong has a knack for keeping the suspense high."

The stubborn siblings’ inability to be kind to each other is brought into sharp focus when a local tragedy leads them to search for a missing child. However, there are a lot of characters in the book, and sometimes you need go back and see who belongs to which smaller unit of the bigger family. Everyone talks the same and wonders in similar language, so it’s often hard to tell them apart. But the overarching story of a family needing to do for others during their own period of grief could be construed as a meaningful allegory for the last three years of world history. Our own dramas playing out against the bigger dramas of the world continue to this day, and FLIGHT makes good use of that seesaw of emotional connection and need.

The story picks up when Henry, Kate and Martin are pushed into the outside world. How they relate in some ways heightens the heartfelt drama inherent in their personal pain. The backdrop --- cold, snowy, Currier and Ives upstate New York --- gives you a shiver every time you read about someone sweating under warm clothes while the wind whips around them. Lynn Steger Strong captures the specifics of nature doing its own thing while the silly humans try hard to control the environment, giving us a dynamic counterpoint to their erstwhile failures to connect and give shape to any of their rampant emotional traumas.

If you are a fan of the film The Family Stone or Tracy Letts’ plays, you will find this to be a truly riveting story. It is written with disarmingly simple prose, and it is an easy book to read in one sitting. However, you won’t be able to take in the full spectrum of want and need, love and anger, that Strong builds into every moment.

Perhaps there is a lot to be said for a family drama set at Christmastime that opens itself up to interpretation in a larger mindset. It is constantly luring us with the possibility of disaster at every turn, and Strong has a knack for keeping the suspense high. FLIGHT is a story of movement --- from one state to another, from one need to another --- and how we all strive to land at a balanced perspective of our world and the world at large.