Visible Empire

January 1, 2018

I admired Pittard's Listen to Me, an intensely telescoped tale of marital crisis, so I'm anticipating this fictional look at the horrific 1962 crash of Paris-to-Atlanta Air France Flight 007. Over 100 of Atlanta's cultural leaders were lost, and Atlanta-born Pittard chronicles the reactions of city residents from the mayor to a teenager denied admission to an integrated school wondering what might change.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2018
The real-life crash of a charter plane full of Atlanta's white elite is the inspiration for a fictional examination of race, class, love, and betrayal.In the summer of 1962, more than 100 Atlanta art lovers were about to return from their junket to the great museums of Italy and France when their jet crashed during takeoff at Orly. The only member of the tour group who didn't perish was Raif Bentley, who took a slightly later plane because he and his wife, parents of three, had a policy of never flying together. In Pittard's (Listen to Me, 2016, etc.) re-imagination of the aftermath of this disaster, Raif returns home to an emotionally ravaged world. His good friends Robert and Lily Tucker, a couple expecting their first child, have lost both of Lily's parents, and Robert, an editor at the Atlanta Journal, has lost his young mistress, a writer from the paper whom he sent to cover the trip. So devastated is he that he walks out on pregnant Lucy that very day and goes into a messy, booze-soaked free fall. The Tuckers' separate perspectives on what happens after that are two of several angles among which the narration rotates. People who have no connection to the crash--Piedmont Dobbs, a 19-year-old African-American who's just left home, and Anastasia Rivers, an opportunistic white beauty who does exhibition diving at a hotel--enter the story as it becomes a study of the effect of privilege on relationships in Atlanta, circa 1962. Some of the angles are more gripping and believable than others; in particular, the engrossing and moving plotline involving Piedmont carries the book and makes some of the rest of it seem rather thin. By the time the novel climaxes at a Fourth of July party held in an over-the-top mansion built on the site of a lynching, one can't help but notice that the plane crash is actually pretty tangential to its main concerns.Within this book is an excellent novel that would have been stronger with a less complicated treatment.

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June 1, 2018
Pittard's fourth novel, after Listen to Me (2016), imagines the lives of several Atlanta residents in the aftermath of a 1962 airplane crash, a true event in which 130 people, many of them among Atlanta's wealthiest citizens, perished. Newspaperman Robert loses his mistress in the crash, and in his despair decides to leave his pregnant wife, Lily. When Robert and a friend are too drunk to drive on a late-night mission, they hire Piedmont, who left school a year prior when his application to be one of the first black students to attend Atlanta's all-white public schools was denied. Their drug-fueled activities send the young man straight into danger and ultimately to Lily, with charged results. Readers follow several other characters, including the city's mayor and his wife, each grieving the city's incalculable loss differently. Individual players can, at times, feel underdeveloped, and the story unfocused. Atlanta native Pittard fills the novel with historical details, local points of reference, and distinct examinations of race and class, though, making it an evocative and discussion-worthy choice for readers who appreciate vivid settings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)