Line of Flight
As the Great War rages in 1915, nothing can stop Simone Levitsky from finding her estranged daughter Camilla—not the shame of Camilla’s decision to run off with her beau from their tightly knit Jewish community to volunteer for the French war effort, not the harsh words they exchanged before Camilla left, not the long transatlantic passage, not even the dark secret Simone carries about her husband’s dying wish. Nothing, until an intriguing fellow passenger on the doomed last voyage of the Lusitania saves her life and irrevocably changes the course of her journey.
In her desperate search for Camilla along the Western Front, Simone is forced to confront the real reason for their bitter parting. Helped by two women—an American expat ambulance driver and a French volunteer at the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris—she discovers a long-buried sense of her true self. She learns, too, from an enigmatic carrier pigeon’s essential messages of love and loss.
Line of Flight explores the intricate dance of mother-daughter relationships during a time echoing our own—a period of massive upheaval that cracked social boundaries, strained family bonds, challenged faith, and forced a reckoning with everything held dear.
Image: “RMS Lusitania torpedoed by German U-boat U-20,” Eyewitness at the National Archives via Wikimedia Commons; drawing printed in the New York Herald and London Sphere, ca. 1915