Review: We Fly Away by J.V. Whittenburg

In We Fly Away, the striking new memoir by J.V. Whittenburg, the author recounts his own incredible story and family history with savagely honest clarity. The third son to a mother of nine, a woman whose sweat and blood and love for her children sits upon every page, the book is told from the unique perspective of a child raised among sharecroppers, a child who was forced to grow up too fast.

Whittenburg writes in the first person, detailing a streaming narrative of his life captured in stunning detail. From his youngest years, dealing with the terror of nearly losing his mother to TB, to the daily struggles and unspoken conversations he witnesses between his parents, this narrator has always had quiet wisdom, even if he didn’t realize it back then.

When telling such a long story from the perspective of a changing individual as life moves forward, it can be difficult to capture the shifting maturity and understanding of the world, but Whittenburg has excellent flexibility in his storytelling. He embodies his narrator exceptionally well, no matter which period of his life is being revealed.

The bonds between the family are perpetually tested as each sibling seeks and finds a different path, some of which are more dangerous, risky, or even illegal. The conflicts that were born in childhood mature and grow right along with each person, and their lives become a tangled web of trust, disappointment, pain and independence. Some go to college, others don’t. A few are scarred by the collapse of their parents’ marriage, while some take the opportunity to slip further away from the crowd. With so many players, there is something nearly Shakespearean about Whittenburg’s story, something epic and indelibly human in its scope.

While the timeline of this memoir is ambitious, making for a comprehensive story of this family, there are simply so many years to encompass that some sections feel rushed, and some developments seem as though they received less time and space than they deserved. Given the intensity of the emotions flying back and forth among this bloodline, more consideration could have been given to those feelings on the page. At times, the story feels procedural, with one event simply following another, diminishing the narrative impact of each. A story this powerful should have room to breathe, and Whittenburg could have taken those moments for more abstract examinations of his experiences.

The prose is straightforward and clear to understand, but some of the sentence structures are repetitive, and there is a dearth of creative or descriptive language. With so much information to include, it would be impossible to have overly flowery language, but there are times when the heart of the story fades slightly because it stops feeling like a memoir, and more like a timeline.

All of that aside, Whittenburg has scooped out parts of his own soul, and the lives of his loved ones, to present a book that exposes hard truths about family, America, loyalty and love.