Flight Lessons by Patricia Gaffney, Jennifer Van Dyck (Read by)

From the Publisher

Anna has studiously avoided her Aunt Rose—the woman she once loved more than anyone else in the world—ever since the night Rose betrayed Anna and her mother, Rose's own fatally ill sister. In the sixteen years that have passed, Anna has built another life for herself far from her hometown on Maryland's eastern shore, but she can't forgive or forget.

Now another betrayal, by a faithless lover, has brought Anna back to her family's restaurant, where Rose needs her estranged niece's help—and trust—more than ever before. Determined to leave as soon as the struggling business is back on its feet and her own hurt is healed, Anna joins Rose in the kitchen of the Bella Sorella, resolved to remain unaffected by Rose's longing to undo the past. But Anna's resistance could blind her to a true and unexpected love that's reaching out to grab her by the heart.

New York Times bestselling author patricia gaffney's Flight Lessons is a poignant, funny, and wise story of truth, loyalty, and the bonds that shape, sustain, and ultimately uplift us.

Publishers Weekly

Alone in a chilly loft in upstate New York, ruing the end of her affair with a two-timing sculptor, Anna Catalano, the heroine of this follow-up to Gaffney's bestselling The Saving Graces, can't resist an invitation to return home to Maryland's Eastern Shore. Her aunt Rose desperately needs a manager for her restaurant, the Bella Sorella, and it has to be family, says intermediary Aunt Iris. Rose and Anna haven't actually been on speaking terms since Anna caught Rose having an affair with Anna's father while her mother was dying. Still, telling herself it's only temporary, Anna signs on for the job. A host of clangorous, adrenaline-pumping kitchen scenes follow, and anyone who's worked in the restaurant business will especially enjoy the clash between the self-taught red-sauce chef and Anna's new hire, a culinary school grad who wants to put pesto in the minestrone. But Gaffney is unaccountably less apt in charting the romance between Anna and a bird-loving lawyer-turned-photographer named Mason Winograd, who must overcome his fear of flying as Anna overcomes her fear of nesting. Their e-mails, while blessedly free of emoticons and tech talk, are too long and too similar in voice. A delicious first kiss leads to a flat full monty: "He got her undressed and then went in the bathroom and came back nude, with condoms." In contrast, the affair between Rose and the dying Theo, Mason's stepfather, is richly nuanced, as are the relationships among the many women in the cast. (Aug. 1) Forecast: The beachfront jacket scene will attract August vacationers, but this comes out a bit too late in the summer to be a full-fledged beach book. Expect blockbuster sales anyway The Saving Graces has sold more than a million copies. 8-city author tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

After catching her boyfriend in bed with her boss, Anna Catalano decides to return to her childhood home. Ironically, an infidelity she witnessed between her aunt and her father 16 years earlier is exactly what drove her away in the first place. Once home, Anna begins the emotional metamorphosis from blame and alienation to forgiveness and acceptance. What results isn't exactly fast-paced, but readers will savor each well-written page and root for the sympathetic, authentic characters despite their flaws. Gaffney serves everything in double helpings: two acts of infidelity, two wounded heroes, two prodigal son stories. All of this is set against the microcosm of a small, family-owned Italian restaurant. Fans of Curtiss Ann Matlock's Driving Lessons, Kathleen Gilles Seidel's Till the Stars Fall, and Gaffney's other novels (e.g., The Saving Graces) will find this new work just as delectable. This is women's fiction at its finest, and public libraries of all sizes will want it for their collections. - Shelley Mosley, Glendale P.L., AZ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In her third hardcover outing, Gaffney struggles to tackle the unforgiving claims of family as an estranged young woman reluctantly moves back home. Not as masterfully plotted as her first (The Saving Graces, 1999), Gaffney's tale still ably details encounters between friends, relatives, and co-workers that help carry the story and mood. When 36-year-old Anna finds her lover in bed with another woman, she decides she has no choice but to accept her aunt Rose's invitation to help her run the family restaurant, Bella Sorella, on Maryland's eastern shore. Anna' s mother Lily died when she was a teenager, and she had once been especially close to Rose, her mother's sister, but in college she caught Rose and her father Paul in bed. Having suspected that they were lovers even when her mother was still alive, a hurt and angry Anna refused to accept Rose's explanations and spent the next decade or so in a series of failed relationships. Now back home, she declares she will stay only long enough to get the restaurant Rose owns back on its feet. As she assiduously avoids talking about the past, she begins making the improvements the restaurant needs, learns that Rose is in love with ailing Theo, a fisherman, and meets his stepson Mason, a former lawyer turned bird photographer. Although Mason's face and body are badly scarred, Anna finds herself attracted to him, but she can't let go of the past and isn't ready to trust him-or Rose. Mason also has secrets and anxieties-he suffers from panic attacks and hates flying, for instance-but this is a story that celebrates learning how to forget and to forgive. And so, while a creaky plot device (a fire) adds some tension, Anna finds herself ready to stayhome and stop running. Perceptive, though insights aren't enough to help the thin plot rise very far. Author tour

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Read an Excerpt

Flight Lessons

Chapter One

The problem, one of them, was that circumstances had split her life down the middle. She was always of two minds, the hopeful half versus the skeptic, optimist against pessimist. Or maybe it evened out and what she was now was a relativist, a contingency artist. Either way, it didn't help that at this late date a theme was taking shape, a motif or whatever you called it, a pattern, consisting of Anna walking in on trusted loved ones in bed with each other.

Then again, two times probably made a soap opera, not a pattern. She tried to lift her situation out of the excessively banal by imagining she had a connection with Sylvia Plath. Not that Anna was suicidal. Over Jay? Please. But it did help to think that she and Sylvia—she called her Sylvia; that's how bonded Anna felt—shared a context, a setting. Really, if anything, her circumstances were worse, because that London winter of '63 could not possibly have been any colder than Buffalo after a blizzard in early April—early April, for God's sake—and poor Sylvia's flat couldn't have been any icier than the windy, rattling loft Jay had left Anna to huddle in by herself while he cavorted with the voluptuous Nicole, whose apartment had a fireplace and central heat.

Jay's idea, the loft. They'd lived in a scruffy corner of it during the first year, the happy time, while he'd used the drafty rest for a studio. Eventually his metal sculptures outgrew it, though, went from enormous to dinosaurian, the ceiling wasn't high enough for the really monstrous ones, they needed a barn of their own. So he'd leased space in anold warehouse on the lake for a studio, and since then, almost another year, they'd had the whole basketball court of an apartment to themselves.

Except for the summer months, they'd spent most of the time in bed. Sleeping, reading, eating, having sex, etc., etc., but mostly trying to keep warm. Had ice crusted on the insides of Sylvia's windows? Had she huddled close to a ticking space heater with a blanket over it and her like a hot tent, and worried about setting herself on fire? If so, Anna could see why the kitchen stove had started to call to her, whisper that it was the warm answer. Lay your head flat on the metal rack, like a turkey roaster, close your eyes. Try not to mind the gas smell. Go to sleep.

Again, not that Anna was contemplating suicide. But she'd been betrayed in the cruelest way a woman could be (no, second cruelest; that life-dividing time at age twenty, that was still worse), and at least Ted Hughes had had the decency to conduct his affairs out of Sylvia's direct line of sight, with women she wasn't friends with or employed by. Some decorum had been observed. A little British restraint, missing in her case. Anna had walked in on Jay with Nicole, her boss, tangled up together in her own bed, three hours after she'd woken up from a laparoscopy for an ovarian cyst. A hospital procedure. Outpatient, yes, but still, she could've died from the anesthesia, people did. If Jay had been worried about her, he'd found a stimulating distraction.

Oh, it was such a stale, tired story, but here was another way she was trying to inject a little dignity into it—by casting herself in the role of tragic heroine. In a play by... some Greek, Sophocles, Aeschylus, she was vague on her classical playwrights this many years after freshman English. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer at the age she was now, thirty-six, and Anna had discovered Jay's infidelity on the very afternoon she was fully, fatalistically, expecting a call from the surgeon telling her she had the same disease. She didn't, her cyst was benign, nothing to worry about, would probably go away by itself—but she didn't know that then, and wasn't it all just too much, too full of awful significance, as if indifferent gods were playing with her life, making literature out of it, throwing in metaphors and parallels and corny portents—

No, it wasn't. It was just soap opera. Her life was like a Greek play only if you imagined a collaboration between Homer and Harold Robbins. And now here she was, trying to keep warm in the big, wide scene of the crime, listening to sleet peck at the frosted-over windows and wind slam them around in their uncaulked sockets, trying not to think about Jay and Nicole.

But it was hard when they'd been here so recently. Enjoyed themselves so thoroughly. They must've enjoyed themselves, otherwise they'd have heard the slow rise of the clanking elevator, at least noticed when the rickety metal doors squealed apart. The loft was wide open and wall-less, but Jay had built a two-sided partition to shield the bed from the view of—well, people like Anna. Intruders. He'd made it from tall, rusting strips of steel, like tree trunks, and painted them with bright birds and winding greenery—ah, a bower, you thought, how romantic. Until you went closer and saw that the birds had human heads with crazed eyes and mad grins, and they were doing lewd things with each other in the greenery. Then, how surreal, you thought, how sardonic and Boschian. How Jay.

She remembered very little, almost nothing of what she'd seen over the partition of the lovers in bed. Situational amnesia, no doubt, the way a car crash survivor can't remember a thing after the light turned red. Jay must've been on the bottom, because she had a vague picture in her mind's eye of his Rasputin hair crosshatching the pillow like an etching, black-on-white. But were he and Nicole visibly naked? Decently hidden under the covers? Blank. Mercifully blank: she had nothing to obsess about—this time—except the fact of betrayal, not the look of it.

She jumped when Jay's cat landed on the pillow and began to purr in her ear, kneading the duvet with his claws. He was only nice to her when he was cold. Chip off the old block. She lifted the covers, let him crawl down and curl up at her hip. "Miss your old man, huh?" she said, scratching him softly under the chin. "Tough."

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

The problem, one of them, was that circumstances had split her life down the middle. She was always of two minds, the hopeful half versus the skeptic, optimist against pessimist. Or maybe it evened out and what she was now was a relativist, a contingency artist. Either way, it didn't help that at this late date a theme was taking shape, a motif or whatever you called it, a pattern, consisting of Anna walking in on trusted loved ones in bed with each other.

Then again, two times probably made a soap opera, not a pattern. She tried to lift her situation out of the excessively banal by imagining she had a connection with Sylvia Plath. Not that Anna was suicidal. Over Jay? Please. But it did help to think that she and Sylvia -- she called her Sylvia; that's how bonded Anna felt -- shared a context, a setting. Really, if anything, her circumstances were worse, because that London winter of '63 could not possibly have been any colder than Buffalo after a blizzard in early April -- early April, for God's sake -- and poor Sylvia's flat couldn't have been any icier than the windy, rattling loft Jay had left Anna to huddle in by herself while he cavorted with the voluptuous Nicole, whose apartment had a fireplace and central heat.

Jay's idea, the loft. They'd lived in a scruffy corner of it during the first year, the happy time, while he'd used the drafty rest for a studio. Eventually his metal sculptures outgrew it, though, went from enormous to dinosaurian, the ceiling wasn't high enough for the really monstrous ones, they needed a barn of their own. So he'd leased space in an oldwarehouse on the lake for a studio, and since then, almost another year, they'd had the whole basketball court of an apartment to themselves.

Except for the summer months, they'd spent most of the time in bed. Sleeping, reading, eating, having sex, etc., etc., but mostly trying to keep warm. Had ice crusted on the insides of Sylvia's windows? Had she huddled close to a ticking space heater with a blanket over it and her like a hot tent, and worried about setting herself on fire? If so, Anna could see why the kitchen stove had started to call to her, whisper that it was the warm answer. Lay your head flat on the metal rack, like a turkey roaster, close your eyes. Try not to mind the gas smell. Go to sleep.

Again, not that Anna was contemplating suicide. But she'd been betrayed in the cruelest way a woman could be (no, second cruelest; that life-dividing time at age twenty, that was still worse), and at least Ted Hughes had had the decency to conduct his affairs out of Sylvia's direct line of sight, with women she wasn't friends with or employed by. Some decorum had been observed. A little British restraint, missing in her case. Anna had walked in on Jay with Nicole, her boss, tangled up together in her own bed, three hours after she'd woken up from a laparoscopy for an ovarian cyst. A hospital procedure. Outpatient, yes, but still, she could've died from the anesthesia, people did. If Jay had been worried about her, he'd found a stimulating distraction.

Oh, it was such a stale, tired story, but here was another way she was trying to inject a little dignity into it -- by casting herself in the role of tragic heroine. In a play by...some Greek, Sophocles, Aeschylus, she was vague on her classical playwrights this many years after freshman English. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer at the age she was now, thirty-six, and Anna had discovered Jay's infidelity on the very afternoon she was fully, fatalistically, expecting a call from the surgeon telling her she had the same disease. She didn't, her cyst was benign, nothing to worry about, would probably go away by itself -- but she didn't know that then, and wasn't it all just too much, too full of awful significance, as if indifferent gods were playing with her life, making literature out of it, throwing in metaphors and parallels and corny portents--

No, it wasn't. It was just soap opera. Her life was like a Greek play only if you imagined a collaboration between Homer and Harold Robbins. And now here she was, trying to keep warm in the big, wide scene of the crime, listening to sleet peck at the frosted-over windows and wind slam them around in their uncaulked sockets, trying not to think about Jay and Nicole.

But it was hard when they'd been here so recently. Enjoyed themselves so thoroughly. They must've enjoyed themselves, otherwise they'd have heard the slow rise of the clanking elevator, at least noticed when the rickety metal doors squealed apart. The loft was wide open and wall-less, but Jay had built a two-sided partition to shield the bed from the view of -- well, people like Anna. Intruders. He'd made it from tall, rusting strips of steel, like tree trunks, and painted them with bright birds and winding greenery -- ah, a bower, you thought, how romantic. Until you went closer and saw that the birds had human heads with crazed eyes and mad grins, and they were doing lewd things with each other in the greenery. Then, how surreal, you thought, how sardonic and Boschian. How Jay.

She remembered very little, almost nothing of what she'd seen over the partition of the lovers in bed. Situational amnesia, no doubt, the way a car crash survivor can't remember a thing after the light turned red. Jay must've been on the bottom, because she had a vague picture in her mind's eye of his Rasputin hair crosshatching the pillow like an etching...