The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo
Our heroine, a snarky, sassy hot ass mess is the perfect narrator for a story about family secrets and how they can destroy and bring together. Her questionable life choices make her relatable (at least to me. Not sure what that says about me). Which gives this unreliable narrator some decent credibility.
Books about the difficulty of families tend to be dark... but Mattie Wallace's voice lends a lightness and humor to the story that has a healing quality to those readers whom are hit a little close to home by this DeCarlo's story.
Melissa DeCarlo's debut novel shows that we have some fun and interesting romps in our future with the quirky, self-deprecating and complex characters she has in store for us.
Synopsis:
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.