Back in March, I read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah. It wasn’t my favorite book in the world, but I was invested enough that I got the sequel, Fly Away, out of the library and read it in May. As I said, I wasn’t a huge fan of Firefly Lane, so the bar for the sequel wasn’t terribly high. Still, I was disappointed. Let me explain.
As with all my reviews, this will be spoiler free, but as with my other reviews of sequels, I might not be able to avoid spoilers from the first book. Fly Away is kind of a strange book in that even though it’s a sequel, it could also stand on its own. So if you want to read Fly Away on its own, stick around, but there will be spoilers from Firefly Lane. At least one very major one, anyway. If you’re interested in reading Firefly Lane without spoilers, this isn’t the review for you. But you can go check out my spoiler-free review for Firefly Lane here.
Fly Away picks up a few years after the end of Firefly Lane. The beginning is pretty cryptic about what’s happened, but since Kate’s death, Tully and Kate’s husband, Johnny have had a falling out; Tully is now addicted to alcohol and narcotics; and Kate’s daughter, Mara, started cutting herself, became a goth and a druggie, ran away from home with a guy, and is basically living on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Then Tully gets in a car accident, and she’s so badly injured that the doctors put her into a medically induced coma. And so everybody comes together around Tully’s hospital bed, and we go back and relive the events of Firefly Lane and then the last four years from Johnny’s point of view, Mara’s point of view, and Tully’s point of view. Tully is having a sort of out-of-body experience and Kate’s spirit is guiding her through her memories. Kind of some magical realism for you there. Tully’s mother comes back into the picture too, and we get the story of her life and Tully’s life from her point of view.
I’m doing a poor job of describing this. I’m sorry. The back cover says the book is about the three women, Tully, Mara, and Tully’s mother Cloud and how they come together, which isn’t much more concrete, and it completely ignores Johnny, who’s a huge part in the book.
As with Firefly Lane, Kristin Hannah’s writing is great. She has such a powerful way of evoking emotions in her scenes. Some of the ambiance of Firefly Lane was lost in this book, because it’s pretty much set in the modern time in a hospital, but the setting is still really strong throughout. I didn’t find the characters to be as compelling as I did in Firefly Lane. Without Kate, everybody just fell apart, and most of the book is them bemoaning the fact that she’s dead. I’m not trying to be unsympathetic or insensitive or anything. I understand that this is a book about grieving. But when it’s coming at you from every character for the whole book, it gets to be too much like whining. Like after a certain point (and I think four years is past that point) you have to pick yourself up and live your life right?
I think part of the problem with the characters, and a big part of my problem with the book, is that it was trying to stand alone as its own book. You could pick up Fly Away and read it without reading Firefly Lane at all. Unfortunately, this means there’s a lot of recap of Firefly Lane, like the first third of the book at least, and it means a lot of the feelings about Kate and her death come off as heavy-handed. If you read Firefly Lane, you grew to know and love her. But if you didn’t read Firefly Lane, then you didn’t get to know her, and her death is only meaningful to the characters. To make up for this, I guess, we get a ton of how wonderful and perfect Kate was and how much everybody loves her. But since I did read Firefly Lane, it felt like Kristin Hannah was trying to force Kate’s wonderfulness down my throat. And I don’t like having anything forced down my throat.
This problem was compounded by the structure of the book. It felt like the book was going in circles. We have a bunch of point of view characters, and we go over the same events from all of their points of view. It’s kind of a cool idea, but it just didn’t work for me. It got redundant.
I will say that I enjoyed Cloud’s section, because I did not expect her story, and she had some great character development. I will say that on top of everything else going on in the book, Cloud’s story, which is tragic, is a little much. Like she could have just had a disagreement with her parents over something stupid. Happens all the time. We didn’t need, well, all that. But finally some character development!
But I wanted to see Tully develop as a character in this book too, because I felt like she didn’t have any character development in Firefly Lane. I do think there is some character development for Tully, but it’s kind of crammed into the ending of the book, and any development she had in the four years between Kate’s death and her car accident, which isn’t much, feels unearned because it’s told in flashbacks.
All this comes down to the fact that I just don’t think the structure of this book worked the way Kristin Hannah intended it to. Or maybe Kristin Hannah’s contemporary stuff just isn’t my cup of tea. But beyond the construction of the book, it was a very heavy book. It felt like we were cramming every bad way to handle grief into one group of characters. This is a grim book. We have addiction, cutting, family estrangement, rape, institutionalization and forced electroshock therapy, and I could keep going. And like I said about the characters grief feeling like whining, it just got to be too much doom and gloom.
Okay, this has become a lot more ranty than I intended it to, so I’m going to stop here. If you’ve gotten this far in my review, you can probably guess that I was not a fan of Fly Away at all. Kristin Hannah’s good writing doesn’t really matter. As I said with Firefly Lane, though, this is not my typical genre of reading, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the genre for me. I know a lot of people who absolutely loved Firefly Lane, and maybe they would like Fly Away too. I hope this review is helpful if you’re deciding to read Fly Away, and as always, if you’ve already read it, I’d love to know what you think.