[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Katherine Center St. Martin’s Press | 302 pages | $27
Margaret Jacobsen works too hard, never met a standardized test she didn’t love and has just gotten an impressive job straight out of business school. The only thing that could make her life better is if Chip, her seemingly perfect boyfriend, would propose.
On a day when she thinks it might happen, Margaret dresses in a strapless black dress, but when Chip picks her up, he drives her out of Austin, where they live, to an airfield where he’s been taking flying lessons. Margaret, who’s been afraid of flying her entire life, protests, but something tells her to go. Chip just might want to pop the question surrounded by the big blue sky.
Which is exactly what happens. Since it’s not easy to communicate in the little Cessna, he points to the glove box. Inside is a ring that’s been in his family. It isn’t anything Margaret would have picked for herself, but she tells herself the real prize is Chip.
All goes well until Chip tries to land. The weather is against him, and he doesn’t even have his license yet. Terror rushes through Margaret, and with good reason. The plane is going down.
Both survive the crash, Chip unscathed and Margaret seriously injured. While in ICU, her family huddles around her, and her estranged sister, Kitty, shows up to make amends. Chip is finding it hard to deal with his shame over the crash, and he’s dealing with it in all the wrong ways.
As the story deepens, we learn secrets. Chip has a big one he’s keeping from Margaret. Margaret’s sister Kitty has a secret that could cause the family to implode. And Margaret’s mother has kept a deception hidden since she was a teen.
At the beginning of this novel, Margaret recalls a family trip to Hawaii when she was in high school. Afraid of the plane crashing, she asked Kitty to help her come up with a survival strategy. Kitty told her not to worry. If the plane went down, she said, they’d be dead. Just like that.
Kitty tells Margaret that dying is easy. And then she adds, “It’s not dying that’s hard.”
Those words come back to Margaret as she’s lying in a hospital bed, where she’ll be for over a month. Chip’s visits are infrequent, and when he does show up, he’s often drinking. She thinks about that perfect life she had, how easily it was taken away.
Slowly, Margaret begins to change. In shock from the crash, she finds it hard to feel anything, and when she does finally feel, she wonders if Chip is someone she’d want to spend a weekend with, much less her life.
How to Walk Away is a breezy read, but it deals with some hard subjects. What is love? Can it survive tragedy? Can tragedy, once survived, turn a perfect life into an even richer one?
Author Katherine Center answers all these questions. And she ends the book with a panorama of hope, for Margaret, and all those she holds dear.
