About The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

 

When an accident leaves teenage cousins Meline and Jocelyn parentless, they come to live with their unknown and eccentric Uncle Marten on his private island.

They soon discover that the island has a history as tragic as their own: it was once an air force training camp, led by a mad commander whose crazed plan to train pilots to fly airplanes without instruments sent eleven pilots to their deaths.

Jocelyn, Meline, and Uncle Marten are soon joined on this island of wrecked planes and wrecked men by an elderly Austrian housekeeper, a very mysterious butler, a cat, and a dog. But to Jocelyn and Meline, being in a strange new place around strange new people only underscores the fact that the world they once knew has ended.

Told in the alternating voices of four characters dealing with grief in different ways, Polly Horvath’s new novel is a rich and complicated story about loss and the possibility—-and impossibility—-of beginning again

Awards

  • The Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize
  • Shortlisted for the 2007 Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book of the Year
  • Included in the Bank Street College list of the Best Children's Books of the Year (Ages Twelve and Up)

Reviews

"Horvath's exploration of the nuances of grief is pitch perfect."—Booklist
 
"Richly idiosyncratic writings."—Booklist
 
"A gripping, chilling tale perfect for leisure readers who demand action and insight"—Children's Bookwatch
 
“Readers will sink deeply into the story.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
"A remarkable examination of the extremes of emotional distress."—The Horn Book
 
"Horvath is a gifted writer."—School Library Journal
 
"Horvath's prose has rarely been more incisive:  she understands the workings of grief and conveys them with uncanny accuracy and sympathy."—Publishers Weekly
 
"This haunting story is balanced with the author's usual detached and quirky humor . . . Taut and weird and sad and funny."—The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books

Excerpts

"Meline" (pdf)

from The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

Almost immediately I had a closer relationship to the island than I had to either my uncle or my cousin. The island with its wind and waves and pounding rain seemed alive. I wasn’t so sure about Uncle Marten or Jocelyn. They were remote in different ways. Jocelyn remained cold and contained and Uncle Marten was never around except at dinner.

We ate dinner every night at a long table that sat twenty. I sat at one end, Jocelyn in the middle, and my uncle at the other end. Uncle Marten made the same thing every night, hot dogs and mac and cheese. We ate it silently in the drafty dining room with the roar of the fire in the large hearth in the living room, the sound of the ubiquitous wind in the eaves and the rain hitting the windows.

Jocelyn cut her hot dogs up with her knife and fork, even the bun, and ate them in tiny, neat pieces. She wiped her mouth on her paper napkin between every bite. My uncle always brought a book down to the table and would read and take notes and then wish us good evening and go to bed. I wasn’t sure if he thought that he was being tactful, allowing us the luxury of silence in our grief, or if he regarded us as birds that had accidentally landed in the house and about which he was too distracted to do anything. If Uncle Marten was disturbed by his brothers’ deaths he didn’t seem to let it interfere with his work.