The Art of Crash Landing: a review

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mattie Wallace is thirty, single, broke and pregnant. When she learns of her grandmother’s death and the possibility of an inheritance, she takes off in her piece of crap car and drives the eight hundred miles from her home in Florida to a small town in Oklahoma called Gandy, where her mother grew up and ran away from thirty five years earlier. When she encounters the residents of this town who all remember her mother, the picture they present is not the one that she knew of her. The woman they all knew was fun, vibrant, artistic, musical, carefree…all traits that disappeared in the woman who Mattie knew. The big mystery of The Art of Crash Landing is why? What happened to this woman, and more importantly, could it happen to her?

At 402 pages, there is a lot of room for this exploration, but at no time does it really drag.

Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, two of the best books I’ve read this year are from authors who have roots in the OKC: The Long and Far Away Gone, by Lou Berney, and this one, by Melissa DeCarlo. TACL is tightly plotted, engrossing, and features a flawed heroine who is in search of her mother’s backstory. And indeed, the story is all in the backstory. It is a mystery that takes the reader through a range of small town characters, whose secrets are not easily given away.
#meldecarlo #Lou_Berney




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