Prisoners of Flight by Sid Gustafson

Publishers Weekly

An unlikely foursome are trapped in an abandoned Montana cabin for the winter in Gustafson's off-key first novel. Engine trouble forces two 50-something war buddies Sling and Henson to land their small plane in the wilderness, damaging the craft in the rough landing. They soon encounter college-age twin sisters ("two breathless earth cookies") who have strayed into the woods looking for their lost dog. The four discover a handy cabin with a supply of flour, cornstarch, cookware and even skis. They dine on the trout Sling catches and the grouse that Henson brings down with a nifty antique bow and arrow set he brought along. The women cook, clean and are duly impressed by the men's accomplishments. Sling, who narrates the tale, reveals that he has been partially deaf since his imprisonment in a North Vietnamese POW camp. He works as a veterinarian and relies on taste and smell to diagnose animal illnesses ("I taste the sweetness of a diabetic cat's urine and know her need for insulin. I smell the breath of a milk-fevered cow and know the depth of her ketosis..."). The sisters, whose father died in a plane crash, talk about their unhappy home life. Henson, who is a Blackfoot/Cree Indian, wants to return to the land, an inclination fueled by the appearance of Kid, a lost Indian deer hunter who stumbles upon their camp just in time for disaster to strike. The improbability of the plot twists is matched by the unintentional humor of the imprecise, strained prose ("Soon we all dream. The dreaming that sleep in the selfsame room awakens, selfsame dreaming"). (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A lugubrious debut about the unhappy fate of four people stranded for the winter in a cabin in backwoods Montana. Narrator Sling and his old Air Force buddy Richard Henson found themselves imprisoned by snow when they had to crash-land Henson’s Piper Cub in the wilderness of Glacier National Park. It was a good news/bad news kind of moment: Sling and Henson were alive, but they had no idea where they were, and their plane was too badly damaged to get them airborne again. Fortunately, they discovered a hunter’s cabin nearby and took shelter there. Both Sling and Henson had both been POWs in Vietnam, so the prospect of a winter in the woods wasn’t exactly the worst predicament they’d ever faced. But their private demons--alcoholism, divorce, and depression, for starters--have been eating away at both of them for decades, and the enforced solitude of their situation now gives them even less opportunity for escape than the Viet Cong did. Before long, the two men are joined by Daphne and Opal, twin sisters who’ve gotten lost in the woods while searching for their runaway dog. Young and naive, the sisters seem just as estranged from real life as Sling and Henson do, albeit with considerably less cause. As the four plod along from day to day in search of food and heat, their lives become reduced to the barest essentials--a process that seems to have begun long before they were stranded--and they have to reexamine the meaning of events they’ve tried for a long time simply to ignore. An excruciatingly interior story: plot and activity quickly fade in the face of remembrance, regret, and recrimination in a carefully worked-out narrative that becomes suffocating after a while.

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