Girl on a Plane by Miriam Moss (review)

Fifteen-year-old Anna leads a divided life, traveling between her English boarding school and her family in Bahrain, where her father is stationed. The Middle East is a volatile place in 1970, however, and on this trip back to the UK, Anna’s plane is hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to a desert airstrip in Jordan. There Anna and her fellow passengers wait as hostages, hoping for their eventual release and fearing a tragic end. Moss bases the story on her own experiences as a teen aboard a hijacked airplane in 1970, and she does an excellent job with the details of the experience, effectively conveying the convergence of small annoyances (drunk fellow passengers), serious discomforts (the scarcity of food and water, the temperature rising above 100°F in the airplane’s metal fuselage in the desert), and large fears (one captor who clearly wishes to kill them all). Anna’s bonding with her seatmates David (an agemate) and Tim (a young boy tending his beloved little turtle) adds another dimension of emotional reality, as do Anna’s wary conversations with one of the hijackers. Ultimately, the book combines youare-there reality with the shape of fictional narrative, and it’ll make for wide-eyed and suspenseful reading. An extensive epilogue describes Moss’ recent return to the site; a note differentiates the fact from the fiction.