Eight year old Maisie has lost her mother, found her father and gained an aunt. Her life is confusing, but her one escape from her fractured reality; she can fly. Her father disappears, her aunt banished from her life and Maisie is suddenly grown up and wondering where her life went and how things went so wrong.

 “When I get back we’re going on an adventure together.”

Maisie at 8000 Feet is a rambling mixture of past, present and possible futures that is confusing and seemingly pointless to the extreme. Frederick Reuss has created and introduced characters with no substance and a story-line with no point and no end. The combination of worthless dialog and abstract reasoning manage to lull the reader into a strange sense of expectation that is never realized. Reuss takes the premise of a flying girl and and creates such bland characters and useless architectural mumbo-jumbo that whatever he was striving for was lost in oblivion. Readers with time to spare and who don’t mind rambling pointless novels might want to try this one; everyone else just find something else to read. This is a total waste of time and energy as it leaves such an unsatisfied feeling when you reach the end that I cannot give any positive recommendation.

.