The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

3.5 Stars

 

“We’re all more than the worst thing we’ve done.”

Dear Mattie Wallace,



I mean to tell you, this girl has zero of her s*&^ together. She’s broke, jobless, homeless, and she just discovered that if you forget to refill your birth control prescription and fail to take the first six pills of the month, something kinda turrrrrrible might be the outcome . . .



When Mattie gets word that a grandmother she’s never known crossed over to the big ol’ malt shop in the sky leaving her with the entire inheritance she thinks her luck might be turning around. In hopes of landing a big pay day, Mattie packs up her deceased mother’s 1978 Malibu and gets to road trippin’ – only to have the car completely blow its tranny upon reaching her destination. It’s there she finds out that granny’s estate will take months to settle and she might end up with squat when it does leaving Mattie with no choice but to seek help from wherever and whoever she can get it. While stranded with the local Okies, Mattie beings to learn that there was more to her mother’s life than being a total boozer and that nearly everyone in town seems to have some sort of connection to her.

She also learns that some weird stuff is going down at the local library . . .



And that while she hasn’t quite yet inherited a house, she has inherited “the Winstons” . . .



(Don’t let the cuteness fool you, they can fart everyone out of a room in 3.7 seconds flat.)

I put The Art of Crash Landing on hold with the library because my friend Larry 5 Starred it. Larry is one of my favorite people here on Goodreads. I stumbled upon him through a mutual friend and have continually been amazed with the reallllly good stuff he finds that I wouldn’t have even heard of if not for his reviews. When I see him 5 Star something, I pay attention. While this one wasn’t perfect for me, I still thought it was better than average. I think it was more my fault due to a combo of me breaking my usual routine of only reading one book at a time in order to do a Stabtober buddy read, and also because I was hoping for a “This Is Where I Leave You” type of fix. I’ll give kudos to Melissa DeCarlo – she did a pretty damn good job of writing the female counterpart to Tropper’s loser MCs. She just went about 50 pages too long in the tooth, spent too much time with the “mystery” of the dead mother, and kind of squicked me out a bit when all was said and done. However, the book was humorous and I appreciated that there was no magic cure for Mattie’s idiocy. The redemption arc was minor, as it generally is in real life. 3.5 Stars from me, but rounded up because of this quote . . .

“‘Blackbird.’

‘I love this song.’

Of course we love it. My mother loved it, too. It’s the theme song of broken things.”