Ask the Passengers

Overview

Astrid Jones cannot talk to the people who are supposed to know her best. Her mother is too controlling and her father too checked-out for either to serve as a confidant, so Astrid takes her questions elsewhere: she lies on a picnic table in her backyard and sends them skyward, toward the anonymous passengers of the planes passing overhead. They cannot answer her, and they cannot judge her, which is exactly what she needs.

What Astrid is working through is a relationship she's not ready to name out loud, one that complicates her sense of who she is and how her friends and family expect her to behave. As the relationship deepens and the people around her start pressing for explanations she isn't prepared to give, her habit of talking to strangers in the sky becomes less a quirk and more a lifeline.

A.S. King builds the novel around this unusual device, using Astrid's imagined connection to unseen passengers to explore what happens when someone is boxed in by everyone else's certainty about who she should be.

Identity, Isolation, and Invented Connection

King's novel is less concerned with plot mechanics than with the interior weight of hiding an essential part of oneself. Astrid's practice of confiding in strangers thirty thousand feet above her is a striking narrative choice: it dramatizes just how few safe outlets she has on the ground, while suggesting that even the most fleeting, one-sided connection can matter. The book sits within a body of young adult fiction that takes seriously the isolation many LGBTQ+ teens describe feeling within their own families and friend groups, and it resists tidy resolution in favor of a more ambivalent, searching tone. Its recognition with a Printz Honor reflects a critical regard for how unconventionally it handles a familiar coming-of-age premise, and it has since been discussed as part of a wave of contemporary YA novels that place a queer protagonist's inner life at the center of the story rather than at its margins.

Why Ask the Passengers Has Been Challenged

Objections to this novel center overwhelmingly on its portrayal of a teenage girl's same-sex romantic feelings and her broader questioning of sexual identity, content that critics have argued is inappropriate for school libraries and classrooms. Related complaints point to depictions of teenage sexuality and underage drinking, and to language some parents and administrators have deemed unsuitable for younger readers. Because the story is told from inside Astrid's uncertainty rather than delivering a clear moral verdict, some challengers have also framed the book as promoting a particular view of sexuality rather than simply depicting one character's experience. In total, the novel has been formally challenged or restricted in 6 states and 14 districts represented in this catalog, reflecting how contested its subject matter has been in different communities even as it has found a wide readership and critical praise elsewhere.