From the TBR Pile: Blog Tour: The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo

Author:Melissa DeCarlo
Publisher: Harper paperbacks
Date of publication: September 2015

Broke and knocked up, Mattie Wallace has got all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags and nowhere to go. Try as she might, she really is turning into her late mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn’t make.

When Mattie gets news of a possible inheritance left by a grandmother she’s never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. Leaving the Florida Panhandle, she drives eight hundred miles to her mother’s birthplace—the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There, she soon learns that her mother remains a local mystery—a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and before long it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother. The deeper Mattie digs for answers, the more precarious her situation becomes. Giving up, however, isn’t an option. Uncovering what started her mother’s downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own.

Mattie is 30, broke, pregnant and basically homeless. That is how The Art of Crash Landing opens. She finds out when she gets to her step-father's house that her long lost grandmother has passed on and left her something. She decides to travel to the town to claim it and at the same time find out more about her mother's life. I really wanted to love this book, but in the end, I just didn't.

The problem for me was the main character. She just wasn't likable. Mattie is 30. Old enough to know better yet she seems not to want to change. She runs he mother's business into the ground because she can't be bothered to answer booking calls. She stops taking her birth control pill for 6 DAYS and figures it will be OK all knowing her boyfriend is a loser. She owes her stepfather's girlfriend money and doesn't even feel guilty about not paying it back. This is just all in the first couple of chapters. Throughout the book, I never felt that Mattie changed much. I got tired of hearing that she was they way she was because of her life with her mother. All that kept going through my head was, "Get over it! You are 30!".

There are two things that I did like about Mattie. I thought her relationship with her step father Queeg was endearing. You could tell they had a mutual love for each other. The other thing that I liked was her decision about the baby. Given her life track, I think adoption would have been the best thing. She didn't seem interested in breaking the cycle, so hopefully the baby would have a better life with someone else.

I'm definitely in the minority on this one. I guess it just wasn't for me.

About Melissa DeCarlo

Melissa DeCarlo was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and has worked as an artist, graphic designer, grant writer, and even (back when computers were the size of refrigerators) a computer programmer. The Art of Crash Landing is her first novel. Melissa now lives in East Texas with her husband and a motley crew of rescue animals.

Find out more about Melissa at her website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Melissa’s Tour Stops

Tuesday, September 8th: Books and Bindings

Thursday, September 10th: The Book Bag

Friday, September 11th: Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World

Tuesday, September 15th: Literary Lindsey

Wednesday, September 16th: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Thursday, September 17th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Friday, September 18th: bookchickdi

Friday, September 18th: Fuelled by Fiction

Wednesday, September 23rd: From the TBR Pile

Thursday, September 24th: Kahakai Kitchen