Customer Reviews

Flight Lessons

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Oscar Wilde quote, "After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations" that Patrica Gaffney prefaces her book with, is an accurate description of the issues she explores in Flight Lessons. In a twist to the biblical prodigal son, Anna returns to her hometown on the Chesapeake bay at the age of 36 and after a disasterous end to a romantic relationship. Anna is a complex, and often quite exasperating character. She is balanced in the book by her aunt Rose, now 60 and the owner of a faltering Italian restaurant. Anna is welcomed home and agrees to manage the restaurant for the summer but is not ready to forgive and forget the family issues that caused her to leave. Rose is a more appealing character, particularly in regard to her relationship with Theo, a crusty Bay waterman, now sidelined with a degenerative disease. All of the characters are finely drawn, Frankie, the talented but troubled new chef at the restaurant, Eddie, the handsome but unreliable bartender and Carmen,the unmarried, overweight long time chef who is resentful of the new chef and the changes Anna wants to make to save the restaurant.The close up look at running a small family restaurant was particularly interesting and the bits of information about birds and bird photography, the avocation of Mason, another character were engrossing. (I will now try to catch a bird yawnings, soemthing I never knew they did) More than a love story, the book is honest and insightful as it explore the complicated dynamics of family and the ways individuals address their own family history. Anna's apparent dysfunction and inabilty to sustain relationships seems as much due to her own unforgiving nature as the tough issues she dealt with as a child and young woman. Our desire to paint family members as either black or white, good or bad is illuminated as Anna addresses her memories of her mother and father as well as Rose. More than a good summer read, the book has enough interest to make your reading list in any season.

In icy upstate New York, Anna Catalano ends her affair with her lover when she catches him with her boss in her bed just after she had outpatient laparascopy. When her Aunt Iris offers her the job of manager of Bella Sorella, Anna decides to accept on a temporary basis though she rarely has gone home to the Maryland Eastern Shore. Anna's Aunt Rose, whom she caught in bed with her father while her mother was dying from ovarian cancer, owns the restaurant. The aunt and the niece are banally civil, but truly communicate through Iris.

Restaurant management proves difficult, but Anna handles it with aplomb. However, she has more trouble coping with her feelings towards photographer Mason Winograd, as she does not trust relationships. More complex and harder on Anna's soul is Rose wants a reconciliation with her beloved niece and will do whatever it takes to succeed.

FLIGHT LESSONS is a wonderful relationship drama that is at its best when the women take center stage without any males in their way though the men are well written characters. The story line engages the reader by looking at the impact a long-term squabble has on individuals. The Rose-Anna situation is cleverly written so that many readers will recognize similar relationships with family members. However, the romance between Anna and Mason never leaves the ground, as it seems pale next to that of the women. Patricia Gaffney provides a strong character driven sequel to her best selling THE SAVING GRACES.

Harriet Klausner

I really liked "Saving Graces" by the same author, although it did make me sad at times (when it was supposed to).

I just finished "Flight Lessons", and I really liked it. It's about coming home, looking back, and moving forward. Anna and Rose are both people you'd like to be friends with, I think, and I could understand both of their motives, their reasons. The background type characters, like Frankie and Carmen, Theo and Mason, make you care about them too.

I actually put off reading my new Mary Higgins Clark novel, as well as Judith Michael's latest, two of my favorite authors, to read this one.

I'll be adding Patricia Gaffney to my list of authors to explore more.

First of all, I'm not quite sure why the cover shows a house on the beach, but that is basically irrelevent...
This is the story of 2 grown women, although more often than not, 36 year old Anna is acting like a petulant child, when she returns home to work in her aunt's restaurant (after finding her lover in bed with her best friend). Anna harbors some deep resentment of her Aunt Rose, somewhat founded due to some infidelities in the past. The reader is clued in to Rose's side of the story long before Anna finds out the truth.
A good deal of the book is about working in the family restaurant, and all the people who are considered "family" because of their employment there. The other, connected subplot is the romance of Anna and Mason, Rose and Theo. I actually felt these relationships should have been more fully developed. It seemed a little unrealistic to me that Mason would continue to desire Anna, seemingly without much in common, after she continuously pulls away from him.
The story, always in 3rd person, is told clearly from both Rose and Anna's viewpoints in alternating chapters, and I thought Patricia Gaffney did an excellent job of articulating both sides, without making either woman the more sympathetic character. However, for me, the greatest flaw of this book was that I really couldn't empathize with either of the women, until near the end.

As an Italian-American, and one who delights in the creative outlet of cooking, as well as the comfort of delicious food, I can't resist a story set in an Italian restaurant. After experiencing heartbreak in her independent life hundreds of miles away from her hometown, Anna returns to help her aging aunts rejuvenate and revive their declining family restaurant. She was driven away years ago by a situation she interpreted as a deep betrayal in which she was unable to forgive the aunt who was responsible. Now, working together with Aunt Rose, and rediscovering the depths of family bonds, and the healing power of love, Anna arrives at a new and more enlightened view of the situation that once divided her family, and eventually learns to let go of past hurts and move forward from there.

In addition to the wonderful setting of this story, I loved the strong hardworking supporting characters, their interactions with each other, the themes of working together towards reconciliation and strengthening family bonds, and so much more. It's a story about priorities; what's important in one's life.

I found the premise of this story interesting. What worked really well for me were the scenes set in the restaurant. The conflict between old and new ways of doing things rings so true, as does the competition between the self-made chef and the trained, creative one. These scenes hummed along. The challenge of a chef working in the restaurant biz and battling alcoholism was great, and real. The problem for me, was that there were too many other stories competing with the restaurant. I just never cared about Mason, probably starting with his name, which is about as unsexy as it gets....makes me think of that pudgy kid that used to do the Oscar Meyer commercials. Besides that though, we just never got to know him. The e-mails back and forth were boring, I skimmed them to get to the story, which for me was about turning around the restaurant. That's where the life and passion was, for me. Anna's so called 'romance' with Mason didn't work for me, I skimmed most of it. Also skimmed the scenes with Rose and Theo....just didn't care about them or Aunt Iris....just wanted to get back to the fun stuff.

So, I whipped through this book, actually probably read about 2 thirds and skimmed the rest.

Enjoyable, but lots of wasted stuff here.

While the plot of FLIGHT LESSONS may not be either particularly involved or original -- a woman returns home to help salvage the family's dying business, which in turn forces her to confront issues from the past -- Pat Gaffney's rich characterizations, as well as the emotional depth behind her deceptively simple prose, certainly made this story a winner for me.

These are people with both strengths and weaknesses, whose actions and attitudes we might not always agree with but whose motivations are always made clear. Gaffney really nails the complexity of human relationships, that true-to-life mixture of tart and sweet that can make the reader both want to root for a character and knock some sense into him or her at the same time. The relationship between the sixty-year-old Rose and her dying lover Theo is a particular treasure, but the quiet, scarred Mason stole my heart (even though I agree with another reviewer that perhaps his emails were too long -- but at least he apologized for that!). A lesser man would have given up on the hard-headed Anna by halfway through the book: that he didn't makes him a real hero in my eyes.

But perhaps what most impressed me was the way in which Gaffney seamlessly braids so many threads. I never felt I was reading about several separate subplots, since each character's situation so tightly intersected with the others'. Very difficult to pull off, but Gaffney makes it seem effortless.

While I've read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Ms. Gaffney's previous contemporary novels, for some reason (Mason, would be my guess) this one's edged out the others as my new favorite. These were people I wouldn't mind checking up on in a few years to see how they're doing.

And I can't ask more of a book than that.

Flight Lessons is a love story in a family setting. Both Anna and Mason are wounded. Anna was traumatized in her teens by seeing her beloved aunt Rose intimate with her father, during the time her mother was dying of cancer. As the story opens, adult Anna has just found her boss and good friend in bed with her boyfriend. Two betrayals are almost two much for her to take. Mason is physically wounded. He has scars and injuries from a bad accident and feels safe only in his house without windows.

Anna's Italian-American family has run the Bella Sorella restaurant in Baltimore for three generations. Anna returns to Baltimore as her relationship and job end abruptly, "temporarily", to help Rose run the restaurant. Anna's father has been dead for five years, and Anna has a new lover, Theo. Anna introduces Rose to Theo's stepson, Mason, and the plot spins out from there. Anna's pain and anger seems real - she's trapped in her history of anger and feels safer being angry than forgiving or even listening. Mason's pain also seems real, and I share his passion for birds, which was lovingly detailed. Rose and Anna's extended family are not as well rounded. They are more of a generic ethnic family, more influenced by the Sopranos than observation.

A romance in a family or community setting makes for a more interesting read and an opportunity to shake up the boy-meets-girl formula. Flight Lessons is not as good an example of that sub genre as The Vineyard, where the family situation is complex enough that a range of outcomes are possible. I enjoyed Flight Lessons, but it's more of a beach read that leaves you ready to move to the next book.

Little story here. Anna, who has a history of hooking up with off-beat men who ultimately cheat on her, struggles with her resentment of a once-favorite aunt who she believes slept with her father while her mother was still alive. Anna is all bent out of shape over her supposition, and self-righteous to the point of tedium about dealing with her aunt when she returns to her hometown to manage her aunt's restaurant. This though her qualifications seem to consist of working at a coffeeshop before, not as the manager; and growing up around the restaurant business her aunt owns. If she despises her aunt so much, why return? To make auntie suffer, of course. If she really hated the woman, why would she ever have any contact with her again? Psychologically conflicted, we must assume, though that is never directly addressed, instead she remains dim and unaware of it. This comes across as a cooked-up conflict [pardon the pun] in the service of the author who needed to write another book. There just isn't enough here to make an absorbing novel, and these women--especially Anna--do not seem like any real woman I have ever known, though Rose is more sympathetic, if also rather too self-sacrificial. She is unable to move on until after her first love's death, though she cannot have him for many years; willing to never find someone else while he lives after her sister stole him from her. Restaurant stuff interesting, though the romantic interest's long e-mails about the birds he photographs are so dull, you are better off to skip them.

Hmm - it's hard to know how to rate this book. The best I can say that it is very uneven - I LOVED the parts about the restaurant and the relationship between Rose and Anna, but I'm afraid that Anna's romance with Mason left me cold. It feels like something simply tacked on to give the book a romantic interest and I can't help feeling that the author didn't have her heart in writing these scenes. I skimmed over those bits in the end (especially when Mason was going on about wild birds of something) and I wish she had just concentrated on the restaurant and the relationships between the people who worked there - that was fascinating and I was constantly being amazed by the honesty and astuteness of her writing. I don't know if the publishers made her put in a love interest so the book would sell but I feel it would have actually been a great book if it had only focused on Anna's relationship with her aunt and her employees at the restaurant.