Melissa Decarlo

The Art of Crash Landing Melissa Decarlo

Publisher Marketing: From a bright new talent comes this debut novel about a young woman who travels for the first time to her mother s hometown and gets sucked into the mystery that changed her family forever. Mattie Wallace has really screwed up this time. Broke and knocked up, she s got all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags and has nowhere to go. Try as she might, Mattie can no longer deny that she really is turning into her mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn t make. When Mattie gets news of a possible inheritance left by a grandmother she s never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. Leaving the Florida Panhandle, she drives eight hundred miles to her mother s birthplace the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There she soon learns that her mother remains a local mystery a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and before long it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother and it happened here. The harder Mattie digs for answers, the more obstacles she encounters. Giving up, however, isn t an option. Uncovering what started her mother s downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own. Hilarious, gripping, and unexpectedly wise, "The Art of Crash Landing" is a poignant novel from an assured new voice." Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2015 (EAN 9780062390547, Paperback) Publishers Weekly 07/06/2015 (EAN 9780062390547, Paperback) Romantic Times 09/01/2015 pg. 36 (EAN 9780062390547, Paperback) Booklist 08/01/2015 pg. 26 (EAN 9780062390547, Paperback) Library Journal 09/01/2015 pg. 90 (EAN 9780062390547, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  DeCarlo, Melissa Melissa DeCarlo was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and has worked as an artist, graphic designer, grant writer, and even (back when computers were the size of refrigerators) a computer programmer. The Art of Crash Landing is her first novel. Melissa now lives in East Texas with her husband and a motley crew of rescue animals.