Cloudmaker by Malcolm Brooks, a coming-of-age novel about the frontier of flight in '30s Montana

Brooks (Painted Horses, 2014) evokes rural Montana’s magnificent beauty in his coming-of-age novel set during aviation’s Golden Age, an era marked by technical ingenuity and the allure of wide-open skies. 

In the small town of Big Coulee in 1937, fourteen-year-old Houston “Huck” Finn yearns to build and fly an airplane and has the chops to achieve it. With his Pop’s support and the help of a new machinist, “Yak” McKee, Huck works diligently while hiding the project from his overprotective, religious mother. 

His sophisticated eighteen-year-old cousin, Annelise, a pilot-in-training banished from California to preserve her reputation after a romantic liaison, arrives expecting dreary exile but instead finds her excitement rekindled by Huck’s enterprise. Danger and mystery enhance the plot when gangsters seek to reclaim an expensive watch Huck had pulled off a dead man found in a local creek. 

The cast and their interactions are wonderful, and digressions into their personal stories deepen the characterizations and historical backdrop. An entrancing tale about the challenges of pursuing one’s dreams and of American frontiers, old and new.

Cloudmaker was published this month by Grove.  I'd read the novel earlier this winter and wrote this draft for Booklist (the review ran in the 2/15/21 issue).