Despite her best efforts, I love Mattie Wallace. She often behaves badly, and she knows it. But it’s who she believes she is, so she behaves badly.
Finding herself in a delicate condition with nowhere to turn, she embarks on an impossible journey to collect an unlikely inheritance. Immersed in the secret lives of her mother and the grandmother she never met, Mattie unwittingly starts to heal. The wounds of her past begin to scab over, and the broken places start to mend. As she skitters down the road of her family history, she drags an entire town, bucking and skidding, along with her.
Real, imperfect, and true to life, Melissa DeCarlo weaves a tale with an ending not so much happy as less hopeless than at the start. The Art of Crash Landing is reminiscent of Seth Greenland’s I Regret Everything and Jonathan Evison’s The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.