Reviewer: Kate
I received a copy of Love Me Anyway by Tiffany Hawk in exchange for an honest review.
Summary:
When twenty-three-year-old Emily Crane’s marriage to her abusive high school sweetheart ends, she trades in her dull small-town life for an all-access pass to see the world as a flight attendant.
Hoping for a new start, she moves to San Francisco to bunk with six other new flight attendants. Among them is KC Valentine, a free spirit who encourages Emily to shed her mousy ways and start collecting experiences as exciting as her passport stamps.
Emily soon follows KC’s advice a little too well, falling in love with an older, married co-worker named Tien, a father to two young girls. But as Emily and Tien become more deeply entangled, KC grows distraught. Neither her friends nor co-workers know the real reason she became a flight attendant: to find her father who abandoned her as a child.
As Emily and KC fly from Vegas to Boston, San Francisco to London, Chicago to Delhi, each searching for love and acceptance, they’re torn between passion and moral conviction, freedom and belonging.
Review:
Love Me Anyway is not a book I would consider fun beach reading, but it is a book that I enjoyed for the poignant perspective of author Tiffany Hawk, the pert narrative pace and the unexpected moments of hilarity that arise out of the darkness. And this book is dark. As the synopsis reveals there is abuse and infidelity, but it does not reveal the death of both body and spirit that loom in the pages. So if you are not in the mood to have the starkness of reality reflected on the pages, set this book aside for another day. But in those moments when you’re tired of the Happily Ever After formula books, this is an interesting novel to sink your eyes into. While it irked me a bit how pretty the book wraps up, the meat of the story warns that there’s really no such thing as Happily Ever—only contentedly right now. What I took away from this interesting reflection of a flight attendant’s life is that there are always challenges and they happen often when you least expect them. But in Emily and KC (and the supporting cast), Tiffany Hawk shows that it’s how we handle those moments of trouble that define who we are and who we can be.
Some may find Emily’s naiveté frustrating and KC’s caginess a bit trying. I had a bit of trouble digesting the image of a flight attendant that Hawk paints (although it explains why plane rides are generally so horrendous these days). And there is an interesting idealism that threads its way into the narrative that really isn’t supported by the evidence of the character’s lives. But there is a gritty, authenticity here that is pretty undeniable. There are moments so heartbreaking and honest that I had to close the book. And there are moments so graphically hysterical that I rolled on the bed with laughter. For all of its flaws, I think I loved Love Me Anyway anyway.
4 Stars
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