From the Bookshelf of Tyler Public Library…

The Art of Crash Landing

Melissa DeCarlo

Why we're reading this: Sometimes the ones we love the most, are the ones we know the least. In Melissa DeCarlo's debut novel, Th…more
[close] Sometimes the ones we love the most, are the ones we know the least. In Melissa DeCarlo's debut novel, The Art of Crash Landing, Mattie Wallace, returns to her Mother's home town, seeking to solve a long- time family mystery. Mattie discovers a great deal more than she bargained for in this humorous novel of a young woman who is her own worst enemy. Filled with wonderfully memorable characters, this is a novel that is truly impossible to put down.

Highly recommended!

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Sep 29, 2015 Linda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: grown-up-books

Read this book. The characters were engaging, & I loved Mattie and all her mess. I was anxious to see where the story went & was not disappointed.

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Mar 20, 2020 Andie rated it liked it

This book was written by a woman who lives here in Tyler, TX about 5 years ago. For some reason, I never read it when it first came out, so I grabbed the audiobook when it was offered on Chirp a couple of weeks ago. Although this story has been told many times before - a young woman with a messed-up life travels to get the inheritance she has been left by the grandmother she has never seen, and once there learns much about herself and where she is from - this is not a bad first novel. It's full ...more

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Apr 10, 2015 Toni Moore rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, 2015-books-read, owned-books, reviewed, favorites, to-read-again

"As an adult, my "The Day I Almost Drowned Because My Mother Was Busy Flirting" story has been in regular rotation with several others, like "Shoplifting Was How I Got New Clothes" and "The Time I Had to Hitchhike to School Because I Missed the Bus and My Mother Was Already Too Drunk to Drive Me." The stories aren't exactly tragic, but they do illustrate the climate of exhausted, boozy neglect that characterized my childhood." …

"The thing is, there was no need for her to have kept it hidden I ne "As an adult, my "The Day I Almost Drowned Because My Mother Was Busy Flirting" story has been in regular rotation with several others, like "Shoplifting Was How I Got New Clothes" and "The Time I Had to Hitchhike to School Because I Missed the Bus and My Mother Was Already Too Drunk to Drive Me." The stories aren't exactly tragic, but they do illustrate the climate of exhausted, boozy neglect that characterized my childhood." …

"The thing is, there was no need for her to have kept it hidden I never once asked to play with the snow globe again. I suppose it's possible that I'd come to associate it with the near drowning and because of that it made me uncomfortable, or maybe once it wasn't forbidden anymore it lost its appeal. Of course, the simplest explanation for my loss of interest is that once you've shaken them a couple of times, snow globes really aren't all that much fun.

And yet, as Luke Lambert, paralegal extraordinaire, so wisely said: when it comes to human behavior, the simplest explanation is rarely the correct one. Because when I'm lying there in the darkness thinking about that damn snow globe, I feel an itch in my chest, an emptiness, as if no matter how deeply I breathe there will always be a place that cannot get enough air.

And then I'm seven years old again, feeling the carpet scratch my sunburned legs, feeling the heat from my mother's body as she sits next to me. And I can smell her perfume and her gin, and I can see the look on her face, and not once does she glance at me as I cradle the glass orb in my little hands. Her interest lies only in the snow globe and in the birds. Those trapped, circling birds." (Pages 60-61)

"Queeg has always told me that the adage “Opportunity only knocks once” is bullshit. “It knocks all the time," he likes to say. "All you have to do is listen for it and open the damn door." What Queeg didn't tell me was that sometimes you can't bring yourself to put your hand on the knob; you're too proud, or too angry. Or too ashamed. Instead you press your ear to the door and hold your breath, listening for the sound of it passing you by. "Next time," you tell yourself, "next time I'll open it." But even as you say it you know you're lying, that there's never going to be a next time.

Well, fuck that shit." (Pages 369-370)

Mattie, the protagonist of this amazing first novel by Melissa DeCarlo, is not a nice person. She lies, she picks loser boyfriends, and she's unreliable and undependable even with people she cares about, like her stepfather, Queeg. She gets pregnant by her latest boyfriend and picks a fight so that she leaves his apartment with all her stuff in plastic garbage bags. It's then that she realizes she has, as she puts it, no real friends, just lots of people she goes drinking with. So it's back to Queeg, who lives in a trailer park and is beginning to have health problems.

The thing is, even with all this real and figurative baggage, a mouth a 1980s punk rocker would be proud of, and an unerring ability to do the wrong thing, I liked Mattie. She's laugh-out-loud funny and she knows when she's being a jerk. She just can't seem to help herself. Much of her behavior seems to be a direct result of her fraught relationship with her mother, who died a few years before the book begins. Mattie knows her mother was screwed up – she was an alcoholic who rarely stopped drinking – but Mattie doesn't know why. This book is the odyssey of Mattie finding out what happened to her mother. Along the way, Mattie finds herself.

DeCarlo has done an outstanding job of making the quirky characters in this book seem real. They have their eccentricities, but these fit each character. The author also deftly interweaves Mattie's past into the story, without confusing the reader.

But here's the bottom line. I finished this book way back in mid-September, and I still think about it -- the characters and the story. I can see reading this book again in a few years, and I bet I'd notice some things I missed the first time around.
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Apr 10, 2015 Mary rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary, unputdownable, humor, mother-daughter-relationships, grief, edelweiss

Sometimes the ones we love the most, are the ones we know the least. In Melissa DeCarlo's debut novel, The Art of Crash Landing, Mattie Wallace, returns to her Mother's home town, seeking to solve a long- time family mystery. Mattie discovers a great deal more than she bargained for in this humorous novel of a young woman who is her own worst enemy. Filled with wonderfully memorable characters, this is a novel that is truly impossible to put down.
Highly recommended ! ...more

Like · see review

Jul 13, 2021 Sheila Austin added it · review of another edition

Jun 11, 2015 Sandi* marked it as to-read

Aug 26, 2018 Tenabodena added it

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