September 23, 2006 - Work of the Day - Mercy Flight by Colleen Mondor

A project that has been set aside for some time, going through the latest Storyglossia and looking at each of the stories, is back up and running.

This time around we look at Colleen Mondor's Mercy Flight.

This story is a quick read, and part of it is due to the way that Mondor sets it up.  Mercy Flight is essentially the story of Mike, a pilot in Alaska, and his being forced to take a dying patient on a flight to Fairbanks, in lieu of taking his paying passengers.

Mondor sets the story up where a portion of the story is Mike, telling the story to other pilots.  This serves nicely, in a background sort of way, as a look into the act of storytelling itself.  Mondor has also chosen an interesting way to tell the story herself - as there is a seemingly omniscient narrator overseeing the entire story, including the sections that Mike tells from his point of view.  There's an assumption left to the reader that both Mike and this unnamed narrator are both reliable.

Beyond that, Mondor sets the story up nicely, and gives just enough information about the aviation business and specific policies to Alaska, where the story is set, to allow the reader to understand everyhing, without being so detailed that it would bog down the story.  A very nice effort, one that allows the reader to understand why Storyglossia would have accepted it.