Straddling the line between childhood and adulthood, she struggles to understand the complexity of the situation while also comforting the younger children around her. Anna waits for days in horrible conditions, not knowing if she’ll make it home alive. Girl on a Plane is suspenseful, frightening, and at times violent. Though Anna is not Jewish, Moss explains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in clear and unbiased terms, and the reader can feel Anna struggling to understand the pain and frustration felt on both sides.

Anna asks him questions about why he’s there and develops empathy for the hijackers and an understanding that she’s being used as a pawn in a much larger fight. After days stuck on the plane nearly starving in the intense desert heat, Anna gets to know one of the hijackers, a man not much older than she is. Moss explains the plight of the Palestinians as Anna comes to understand it. Moss paints a clear picture of each of the characters on board the plane and the many different ways that people cope in traumatic situations. Seated in a section for unaccompanied minors, Anna quickly befriends her two seatmates. As soon as Anna gets on her flight the scope of the novel shrinks: Moss blocks out the outside world and creates a stark difference between life on the plane and the life continuing on in Anna’s imagination.

Ann far prefers this vibrant, remote island to the drab British boarding school she’s about to return to. The novel opens in Bahrain, where the reader gets to know Anna in the context of her warm and loving family. In Girl on a Plane,Moss tells a version of her own story through the fictionalized Anna.Īnna’s the child of a military family and has lived all over the world. When British children’s book author Miriam Moss was fifteen years old, she was on one of those planes. In September 1970, three planes bound for London were hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and forced to land in a remote Jordanian desert airstrip.

Girl on a Plane by Miriam Moss