I have read a few of Hannah’s books and I have to tell you, I can’t decide if I love her or hate her. The first book I read by her was The Things We Do For Love and I absolutely loved it! My next was Once in Every Life which I hated. So I decided to give Kristin Hannah one more try with Firefly Lane, which I still haven’t reviewed because I can’t decide if I loved it or hated it. For a majority of the book I was in love, I finished this 528 page book in two sittings, and cried my eyes out at the end; which is why, I think, I can’t decide to love it or hate it. In the end though, I loved it without even realizing it. I thought about these characters for so long after I finished the book I knew I needed more. I only wish Hannah would have written Fly Away differently.
Fly Away starts out with Tully drunk and passed out in a Seattle bathroom stall. She is a train wreck, completely and utterly lost. She manages to get home and passes out on her sofa cursing her dead best friend for dying. She opens her eyes again long enough to realize a trashy magazine had run a story on her calling her an addict, the factual story however, is told by one Marah Ryan. Deeply hurt (and still loaded) she grabs her keys and leaves. Two hours later she is in a horrible car accident and rushed to the hospital. And so starts Fly Away.
For the first half of the book, I contemplated putting it down and making up my own stories for the characters, how I wanted them to live on. I was bored and annoyed with how Hannah jumped back in time, from the present (2010) to the past, the year Kate died and the years that followed. I felt like I was reading a new version of The Christmas Carol and the author was the Ghost of Christmas Past. Hannah tells the story of each character and how Kate's death affected them all, her husband, children, mother and father but most of all Tully. Of course they all have fallen apart in their own ways, who wouldn’t? The part that gets me is how Hannah tells the story of the four years since Kate’s death. It reminded me a lot of Once in Every Life, which, if you remember, I am not a fan of.
The last half of the book was really where the story pulled me back in and left me (again) sitting on my sofa at 2 am crying. I really loved learning about Cloud (Dorothy) and her past. For the whole first book I hated her for being a crappy mother, we learn that she had good reasons for running, I would have ran too. Families really come together during a tragedy; they realize that the past is in fact the past, and the only way to move on is to forgive. This happens in Fly Away, but only with the help of TullyandKate.
