"The Floatplane Notebooks explores the rich history and inner workings of the Copeland family, as its various members struggle with both everyday concerns and catastrophes from 1956 to 1971. Told through alternating speakers, the novel follows the family's youngest generation, a wildly diverse group, as they navigate through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. There are escapades and challenges, jealousies and heartbreak, rollicking humor and haunting tragedy, and as the novel progresses we are drawn more and more into the characters' efforts to achieve fulfillment and reconciliation, with themselves and with their loved ones. The family patriarch, Albert Copeland, who for years has been lovingly tinkering with a floatplane that he has built from an incomplete kit, perhaps best represents the family's often misguided but endearing eccentricities; and the floatplane itself, pieced together and precariously wobbly, suggests the instability of the family itself, tested time and again by disruptions and threats from within and without"--