Review of the Day: Mid Air by Alicia D. Williams

Mid Air
By Alicia D. Williams
Illustrated by Daniel Egneus
Edited by Caitlyn Dloughy
Atheneum (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781665941716
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now

I missed Genesis Begins Again. That sounds silly. How do you miss a book? Can’t you just pick it up anytime and read it? Normally, yes, and I could certainly do that right now if I wanted to. Could just walk over to a library or bookstore, pick up a copy, and start to read. But as a children’s book reviewer I hold myself to a weird rule. There are so many children’s books published in a given year, SO MANY, that it can be difficult to sort through them and figure out which ones to read. If you’re trying to read the best ones, you have to cut something out, so I long ago instituted a rule where I only read kids’ books in their current publication year. Have I broken this rule? Occasionally, but by and large I’m pretty good about it. And then came the Newbery Awards for the best written books for kids and I realized belatedly that I hadn’t read one of the Honor winners. Worse, the Newberys are announced in the following publishing year. I still intended to go back and listen to the audiobook or something, but time passed. More and more and more books were coming out, and in time I just sort of forgot. All this is a roundabout way of saying that in a way, when I came to read Mid Air I was still fresh. I hadn’t encountered the writing of Ms. Alicia D. Williams for myself, firsthand, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, people have won Newbery Honors for pretty mediocre books, right? Maybe, but I suspect you would not be able to add Ms. Williams to that list. If you can imagine a 46-year-old woman on an airplane, snot and tears pouring out of her while she downs a title intended for 12-year-olds, then you’ve a fairly clear picture of what this doggone book just did to me. Mid Air is an ambitious little number with a multi-layered plot and characters you somehow manage to get to know and care about through a brief scattering of words. I missed Genesis Begins Again. Make sure you don’t miss Mid Air.

Bet. It’s a magic word. With it, Isaiah and his two best friends Drew and Darius can attempt all kinds of incredible stunts and tricks. True, Isaiah’s probably more likely to choke than either of the other two, like the time they almost got him to go down the world’s biggest dirt mound. But when one of their bets has tragic consequences and Darius dies, Isaiah and Drew the bets die too, and the two are left to pick up the pieces. And what do you even do when your friend is dead? Drew won’t talk about it and then Isaiah gets beaten up by one of the men inadvertently responsible for Darius’s death. Things are bad all around, but when Isaiah has a chance to stay with family in North Carolina, he finds a healing there he could never have found at home.

This book is probably single-handedly responsible for changing an old and (frankly) outdated belief of mine regarding verse fiction. It has always been my opinion that if you are going to write a book in verse, you need to justify that choice in some way. I think we’ve all encountered middle grade novels for kids that are in verse just because it makes the book look longer. But after reading Mid Air I want to revise that thinking a tad. Maybe it’s not that you need to justify the format. Maybe you just need to make the format do the work it needs to do to tell its story correctly. I don’t know that Ms. Williams would describe herself as a poet, but there is some serious lyricism at work on these pages. Even better, she has a way of making the verse on the page reflect the inflections of a person’s voice when they’re speaking. With her writing, the verse is mirroring the awkward stops, the pauses, or the running, rolling sentences.

Honestly, Mid Air may be the best example I’ve seen in a while of a book that would both be interesting for kids to read and also contains just a plethora of outright lyrical sentences. Like when Drew comes over to Isaiah’s house to sleep sometimes and it says, “His navy-blue hoodie swallows his head. He wraps himself cocoon tight. I stay silent, waiting for him to work out each knot, looping and unlooping, until whatever’s got him tied up unravels.” I mean, that’s just so beautifully put together. Later, there’s a moment when Isaiah says that his mom told him she wanted a girl, so as to teacher her own to be brave, bold and fierce. “But God saw fit to / take away one of my X / chromosomes. Turn it Y. / Guess those lessons… / those lessons / weren’t meant for / me.”

Now I’d be the first person to say that the book isn’t exactly a laugh riot. I mean, there are a lot more dead kids in this title that I’m necessarily comfortable with (anything over zero is, in my book, “a lot”). And my 10-year-old son just attempted to convince me that the death of any kid in a novel automatically makes it YA (we disagree on this point). Still, Williams is the kind of smart writer who knows that if you can inject a little levity onto these pages, that’s going to go a long way towards convincing young readers that they like the person making the joke (in this case, the main character). So, for example, when Isaiah at the beginning of the book says that the hill he and his friends are thinking about conquering is janky, the book reads, “But dang, wasn’t picturing a bootleg Mount Kilimanjaro.” Or later when he discusses Darius’s love of comics. “Knew Marvel’s and DC’s universes like he had dual citizenship.” This would never be called a funny book, but it’s no slog either.

It seems a bit odd if I don’t mention the watercolors that pepper this book throughout. A little unfair too, since the review copy I was given of this title contained an incomplete number of them. Suffice to say the ones I was able to see were beautiful. They pepper the book at key points, never distracting from the text. Only adding. You don’t necessarily need them, of course, but there’s something about them that alleviates some of the tension in the text. They’re interstitial and not strictly necessary, but neither do they distract from the writing. And for those kids that need them, they’ll be there.

I’ll be frank. I have no idea how you write a book like this. A book that just layers its plots and emotions, one on top of another, without ever losing sight of the themes and the bigger picture. How do you know how much personality to include at the story’s beginning so that when Darius dies it’s as much a shock to the reader as the main character? If you’re writing in verse, how do you layer the hurt and the shock and the betrayal and (most importantly) the survivor’s guilt that Isaiah and Drew are dealing with? How do you write a book where two characters live through the same event but are processing it in two different ways? And how do you make it compelling and good? Yeah, I have no answers for you, unless the answer is just me holding this book up, pointing to it, and saying, “Uh, like this. Here.” Because Mid Air IS the answer to those questions. Adept and fleet footed with nary a misstep, allow me to recommend a little something to wring your heart out and then pump it up all over again. Exquisitely crafted.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Interviews: Please be sure to check out my interview with Ms. Williams earlier this year about this book and some of the thoughts that went into it.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Review 2024, Reviews