Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright: Book Review

               Elyse Bearden is normal. She leads a simple life as a housewife, mother, and potter. She has luncheons and her book club with ‘the girls,’ and lives everyday almost exactly the same. She could be any American woman picked at random except for one thing, a chance encounter.

                As she is flying home, Elyse meets Gerry, a married man, who shares her burden of normalcy. They quickly strike up a conversation that soon takes on a flirtatious nature. Elyse’s life changes there on that plane. Her seemingly normal life has suddenly taken on a dangerous and exciting edge. Somewhere above the roofs of all the other American housewives, she breaks free from the mold. Elyse and Gerry share an airplane aisle and a treacherous kiss. She is left standing dumbfounded in the airport with nothing but Gerry’s phone number and a dangerous kiss on her lips. Elyse must decide if she wants to keep her ‘holly housewife’ life or make a phone call that could change everything.

  As the story unfolds Elyse and Gerry begin a torrid affair that slowly begins to set Elyse free from her bonds of normalcy. As she comes into her own as a woman, people in her life attempt to pull her back to the rule of Southern suburbia. In some ways, her husband, longtime friend Kelly, and the other ladies in the book club must keep Elyse’s existence the same, in order to maintain the semblance of normalcy in their own lives. Elyse must make the decision to risk everything for freedom or go back to her regular life in order to stick to the status quo.

Love in Mid Air weaves a fascinating character study of women in suburbia, some willing to stick to their regular lives, if only for appearance sakes, and others willing to risk everything for love and independence. The story is a constant page turner that I couldn’t manage to put down. In a way the book is like watching a train wreck: something bad is inevitably going to happen, but we must watch the fascinating process leading up to it. I usually have a problem with book endings but I think the conclusion of ‘Love in Mid Air’ is spot-on. The last chapter is absolutely brilliant in the way it jumps between past, present and future all in the same sentence. The only advice I would give to Ms. Wright is to develop her minor characters a bit more, to give us more background. I believe this book will appeal to every woman wondering if their lives will ever change. It just goes to show that all it takes is the right seat on an airplane.

 

Sites of Interest: Author's Site | Buy the Book

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing | Published March 29, 2010

Hardcover | 320 pages | ISBN 978-0446540445

Happy Reading

~ Melony