In the beginning of Kim Ponders’s well-crafted first novel, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, five-year-old Annie Shaw dreams of becoming a pilot just like her dad.

In 1972, my father flew cargo planes out of Thailand…. He often surprised my mother and me, returning a day or two early, and my mother would stick her sewing needle in the little battle-weary pincushion or drop the laundry basket at her feet and run to the back door as soon as she heard his boots on the stairs.

Like William Maxwell’s remarkable boy narrator in So Long, See You Tomorrow, Annie Shaw is a retrospective character in the first chapter. Here Ponders aptly fuses the child’s point of view—“The men’s knees poked up from the edge of the sofa like a column of spires”—with an adult’s ability to draw conclusions—“[My mother] argued with herself as she cooked, as if negotiating something between the two halves of herself, the one that wanted my father home and the one that didn’t.” Young Annie sees things acutely: the “battle-weary pincushion,” the “narrow, frostbitten roads,” and her distraught mother, who stands with “a towel twisted fiercely in her hands.”

Things start getting worse: Dad has affairs, Mom drives like hell to the state line with Annie in tow. And then something very bad happens, shockingly, in the space of a paragraph, something Annie will have to recount in a lifetime of shrink sessions, we assume. Instead, thirteen years later, she joins the armed forces; she’ll eventually serve as a pilot in the first Gulf War.

Why would the sharp, sweet girl from chapter 1 want this life? In Ponders’s Air Force there are frat-boy types, frequent dares, and bored, empty hours spent waiting. In a strip club Annie’s buddies cajole her into a lap dance with a woman whose skin is “soaked in vanilla… moist as the inside of a peach.” For this, Annie receives the unsettling pronouncement, “You’re one of us now.” But Annie welcomes it all—the tests and drills and rules. She needs not to think, and this what makes her military career memorable: it lets her escape.

Throughout the novel, Ponders shifts between first- and third-person perspective. The frequent changes in viewpoint provide an appropriate push and pull, and help to further emphasize the detachment Annie orchestrates for herself. In flight, Annie likes “the distance between [herself] and the...