A Post 9/11 Nightmare (In Multiple Ways)

Falling by TJ Newman

Pages: 284 Genre: thriller

Rating: 2 Stars

Kindle Notes and Highlights

Pilot Bill Hoffman is ready for his flight. It's not a flight he's particularly happy to be piloting, especially given the conflict it spurred between him and his wife, Carrie. But it's fine. Until he's in the air and discovers that Carrie and his two kids have been kidnapped, and the terrorist is offering him a choice: either he crashes the plane or his family blows up. It's his call to make, and he only has a few hours to make it.

I had read Worst Case Scenario by this author last year, and I really liked it. I saw that Newman's debut novel was available from the library and figured it would be a quick, tense, and safe read while I'm in a little bit of a slump. Unfortunately, this one did not match up to the quality of the other one. For the most part, the actual experience reading it was just fine. But the glaring plot issues and the weak characters made this book a less-than-stellar experience.

The biggest issue with this book was the very upfront racism. The terrorists in this book were from Kurdistan. I don't know anything about how accurate the book depicted America's relationship with Kurdistan, but I do know that in a post-9/11 America, creating fictional Middle Eastern people to be your terrorists is very lazy narrative choice, especially since the book was published in 2021. They weren't Muslim (for some reason the book goes out of its way to say multiple times that it's not a religious thing for them, as if that makes it better), but the idea of the scary Middle Eastern is a racist stereotype that became a lot more prevalent after the attacks in 2001. To still be playing into that racist fear now, 20 years later, is a bewildering choice.

I think that Newman was actually trying to subvert this trope by giving them a tragic backstory related to America's uncaring intervention in foreign countries, but that never came to fruition. Unfortunately, America does to a lot of horrible things to other countries — just look at our current treatment of Palestine. At the end of the day, the plane-hijacking terrorists in this book are still just vaguely wanting revenge on America for an atrocity that, narratively, is not connected to Bill/the plane. I'm not going to feel bad for these characters as they are, so the decision to make them Middle Eastern terrorists is just playing into the harmful stereotypes.

To be perfectly clear: the biggest crime here is not just lazy writing. These stereotypes create real harm for Middle Eastern communities, both foreign and abroad. By playing into these stereotypes (even with all the attempts at subverting) you're only reinforcing these beliefs for the average American reader, which causes real violence. This is especially true when you consider the white characters and the way they are written. Everyone knows that white Americans are empathetic and understanding, especially in the face of fear and terrorism, unlike Scary Brown People who just try to kill others (sarcasm, obviously). By the end of the book, White Saviorism is literally the biggest victor. It's just a disappointing choice for this author.

The only slight understanding that I can offer to the author is unfortunately not very kind. If it's not a fully racist choice, it is just proof of bad writing. Because yes, the villains are stereotypical, but so is everyone else. The Hoffmans are the all-American white family with a handsome and hardworking father, an attractive and perfectly-maternal mother, a boy who loves baseball, and a cute baby. Of the flight attendants on board, one of them is a Black woman who is a little bit too close to being a mammy-type character and another is a sassy man who goes by "Daddy" (which is just not an appropriate nickname to ask people to call you at work). It was impossible to care about any of these characters (or ones that I didn't mention) beyond surface level because they didn't EXIST beyond surface level.

I really struggled to understand the plot beyond the main conflict mentioned in the blurb. I don't want to spoil it, but it seems like someone told the terrorists that they should stall as much as they can to kill people. To give the author some credit, there were new developments happening throughout, so we weren't literally just stuck with Bill as he struggles with this one singular choice for 300 pages. But none of these "other things" actually made sense. The main plot device — the moral dilemma presented to Bill about picking his family or the plane — is actually largely irrelevant to the main story. Why is Bill being given this choice? Just because. (There is a reason, but it's not good and I'm not going to spoil it.) I think the plot needed a little bit more work to justify the actual message that the terrorists were trying to send, which would make the story as a whole feel more clear and cohesive.

This book was fine. It was about as good as just-under 300 pages of American propaganda can be. I know that this author can write a good book, so I'm hoping that the missteps in Falling are things that she has grown and learned from, both literarily and culturally. But white authors need to be held to better standards. The lessons she may or may not have learned from this book in regards to her portrayal of Middle Eastern people are not lessons that she should be learning through a New York Times Best Seller. If you have the resources to be a published author with a blurb from James Patterson and, if I remember correctly, a movie deal, then you have the resources to educate yourself on harmful racial stereotypes and their historical impact on marginalized races and ethnicities.