Fabulous Fiction Firsts #554

Thu, 09/17/2015 - 10:31pm by muffy

Coming in at the #1 spot of September LibraryReads List is The Art of Crash Landing, a debut novel by Melissa DeCarlo.

"Irresponsible. Undependable. Erratic." - that how 30 year-old free-lance photographer Mattie Wallace describes herself. Broke and knocked up, with all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags, and nowhere to go, she drives the 800 miles to claim a bequest left to her by a grandmother she has never met, knowing full-well that this might be one last chance to turn things around.

When she arrives at the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma, her grandmother's estate turns out to be meager at best but she does have the key to her mother's childhood home. The kindness of strangers, most of whom knew her mother gives Mattie the opportunity to uncover the mystery that turns a happy, talented teenager into the broken alcoholic mother that she knows. Uncovering what started her mother's downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own.

"Hilarious, gripping, and unexpectedly wise,... first-novelist DeCarlo deftly weaves in flashbacks about Mattie's childhood and creates a cast of wonderfully full-blooded, fallible characters,... Best of all is Mattie herself, who has cultivated a measure of humanity in addition to impressive survival skills and whose briskly told story is instantly involving."

For readers who enjoyed The Time of My Life by Cecelia Ahern; Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch; and Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston.