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- Flying Solo Reviewed By John Cowans of Bookpleasures.com
Flying Solo Reviewed By John Cowans of Bookpleasures.com
- By John Cowans
- Published August 30, 2012
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
John Cowans
Reviewer John Cowans: John lives in
retirement in Chester, NS ,where he has been an Instructor with
Seniors College Association of Nova Scotia.
He is currently working on a personal memoir, Other People’s Children, and his first poetry collection, Hope.
View all articles by John Cowans
Author: Jeanette Vaughan
Publisher: Age View Press
ISBN: 978-0615618883
Anyone interested in
planes and flying as I am should not be misled, as I was, by the
title of this book and many of the promotional blurbs about it. One
finds out rather quickly that Flying Solo is more about Nora
Broussard Greenwood’s life as a wife, mother and illicit lover than
as a pilot, and any turbulence that occurs is to be found in the home
and bedroom rather than amongst the ‘sun-split clouds’ as John
Magee writes in his well- loved poem, High Flight.
In her Acknowledgments, Jeanette Vaughan tells us that Flying Solo is based on a true story and that interested me too, but all my efforts to find out about the real French Cajun Nora Broussard Greenwood led once again to disappointment so I can only assume that names have been changed by the author for the usual reasons.
Jeanette Vaughan is an established writer and story teller. She has published in periodicals and professional journals of nursing, and out on her sheep farm, she continues to write. She is the mother of four children, including two Navy pilots. She lives in a Victorian farmhouse in northeast Texas with her sheep, chickens, donkeys and dogs.
I have no doubt that Ms.Vaughan’s Flying Solo will find an
enthusiastic readership amongst single or married women of a certain
age who lean towards romantic novels which contain just enough sex
and violence to interest the pruriently voyeuristic. The
disintegration of Nora’s marriage to a brutish, sexually aggressive
husband coupled with her interest in taking flying lessons as a means
of physical escape leads invariably to a torrid affair with her
Adonis-like flight instructor who just happens to be married to a
sickly wife and so on.... and so on......Well, I don’t want to
spoil the rest of the story for you.
The New Orleans setting adds greatly to the exotic ambiance of the adventure and one cannot help but admire Nora’s strength of character as she wends her way through her troubled life. Finally, I would like to know the titles of Ms. Vaughan’s other novels but again my search was in vain. So.... lovers of romantic tales ‘Fly Solo’ and enjoy; aviation buffs keep looking.
