Told alternately in the voices of 17-year-old Airin Grace Marks (a namesake of the title character in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace) and 19-year-old Ry Truman, Freefall deals with tough issues in a compelling and sensitive manner. Although it’s focused primarily on Airin’s obsession with flying, her desire to be a writer, and her recovery from childhood sexual abuse, the novel explores the healing, burgeoning independence, and deepening friendship of both characters. The novel is bookended by several pages of Airin’s handwritten poems, presented as excerpts from her journals – a nice addition that gives further context and voice to her struggles.

Airin has been obsessed with planes since her youth, so her first attraction when she begins working at Ry’s new skydiving training centre is the Cessna. But she is quickly pulled into skydiving, trying to capture the sense of flying she has long craved. She is up against her mother and stepfather’s concerns about her job and interests, however, and their objections to her growing friendship with Diego Montgomery, a middle-aged writer who is researching skydiving for a novel and encouraging Airin in her writing. Yet it becomes increasingly clear Diego is not who he claims to be; his falseness forces Airin to confront the darkest part of her past, the part she’s tried to shut away in boxes in her closet and compartments in her mind.

Wendy Lewis’s story is compelling, but at times it takes on too much. The connection between Ry and Airin that’s revealed near the end of the novel is overly neat, and the jealous behaviour of Airin’s mother is also problematic. Although such behaviour occurs, I found it difficult to believe that Airin’s mother would blame her abused and traumatized child for being victimized by her pedophile husband and for trying to protect herself, and would later risk her being victimized again.