Paper Doll
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
During the air war over Germany, the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress tries to achieve some competence as a unit before their most catastrophic mission yet
They call their plane “Paper Doll,” the joke being its suggestion of flimsiness, inconsequence, and perishability, and none of them, from the veterans to the newcomers, feel the bravery they’d like to project. But now, despite their myriad limitations, they’ve been tasked with living through the tension and boredom of base life, saving one another’s lives, and rejoicing at those missions they’ve survived—until they’re confronted by the shock of a mission directed against the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, a mission that will outfly the capacities of their fighter escorts and take them hundreds of miles through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense.
National Book Award finalist and author of The Book of Aron Jim Shepard brilliantly illustrates both the lunacy and intimacy of these young men’s lives on the ground as well as their growing disillusionment and terror at what lies ahead. Unsentimental and unsparing in its honesty, Paper Doll portrays with stirring clarity the realities of war and the bonds forged in the face of death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After Shepard's exhilarating first novel, Flights, this book comes as something of a disappointment. Set during World War II, it is the curiously static story of a bomber crew stationed in England. Though Shepard goes to great lengths in delineating a realistic portrait of these men, the book never takes off. Unlike the cliched Hollywood crew, who exude esprit de corps and gallant fatalism, the men of the bomber Paper Doll are little more than boys, dreading every mission. The central character, flight engineer Bobby Bryant, is immature and fearful, but he desperately wants the crew to become heroic buddies. Unlike Biddy, the protagonist in Flights, Bobby is not a compelling character whose pain becomes the reader's. Yet this novel is manifestly the work of a gifted writer, illuminating with unsentimental clarity the tragic confusion of men, young in years and experience, thrown into the senseless carnage of war.
