TO READ · 06/29/2017
Summer Reading: “Fly Me” by Daniel Riley
Recent Vassar graduate Suzy Whitman couldn’t have known that within months of moving across the country—ostensibly to skate, surf, and steward the clear blue skies aboard Grand Pacific Airlines’ 747s— she’d be smuggling drugs and even flying the planes herself. But it’s 1972, skyjackings appear in the papers every week, and our russet-headed, antics-prone heroine is soon at the center of a strange and mostly forgotten chapter of American history. Led Zeppelin plays on the radio; Walter Cronkite’s face seems always to be on TV. Pog is the nonalcoholic beverage of choice, and Reverend Jim Jones is posting flyers on the boardwalk. Suzy, meanwhile, is learning just how dangerously she’s willing to live.
“Fly Me,” Daniel Riley’s debut novel, is funny, poignant, and attentive. Sun-soaked and warm-hearted, it almost seems as though it were *written* on the beach.