I just finished reading The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin and I loved it. It came highly recommended by a friend so I went into it excited with high expectations...I love the era and I'm a huge reader of historical fiction overall. It surpassed what I had hoped. It's a well written novel of a woman, her hero husband, her family and a country that was in awe of them and isolated them at the same time.
It begins in 1974 as Charles Lindbergh is facing death and his family is flying him to the quiet of Hawaii as he instructed. It chronicles back immediately to Anne Morrow and her time at Smith Collage when her prominent father was Ambassador to Mexico. A time prior to Lindbergh...a figure then only known to her on the screen & headlines as the boy who recently flew across the Atlantic. As the novel moves forward she becomes The Aviator's Wife and the well educated Smith girl with great writing potential lives in his shadow. Her life soars and crashes through loneliness, fame, family, kidnapping, The Great Depression and war.
Things are never exactly how they appear and as a country hailed an aviator who reached the heavens at home his wife was required to keep a home built around the concept of a cockpit...always control cost and never keep what you don't deem absolutely necessary. Pennies were counted and household goods, like soap, were required, by Lindbergh, to be inventoried by Anne so that clutter could be eliminated.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh shows her strength and determination to survive even as her ideas of everything around her are reshaped and restructured. It's an amazing novel of personal growth. It's one of the best historical fiction books that I've ever read. Happy Weekend! xo
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