The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach
I was provided with a copy of The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach to review. These are my honest thoughts on the book.
TL;DR: Well-written, a good story for any reader looking to delve a little behind the curtain of people’s family lives and motivations. The characters aren’t always likable, but they’re always interesting.
Rose and Hank are headed out for an anniversary dinner in their small Maine town when their evening is interrupted. Rose sees a baby - Owen - falling from a window and likely saves its life when she catches it.
This split second heroic action sets into motion events for Rose, Hank, and the baby’s mother Sophia, tying their lives together and forcing them into decisions and situations they likely never foresaw being part of their lives. But they’re not all negative. For example, Sophia (mostly) steps back from her life as a partying teenager to attend therapy and arrange a first birthday celebration for Owen.
Readers get to follow the story from the individual perspectives of Rose, Hank, and Sophia, giving a comprehensive look at their interior lives as well as the experience of the wider community. Here, we see judgment, self-judgment, impulsivity, poor decisions, good decisions, generosity, effort, envy, and mistrust.
Dupree does a wonderful job of creating characters who are neither good nor bad, but multi-faceted humans with a lot of choices to make every day. She creates several portraits of motherhood within the book, with no one example being perfect. The characters and their development is the heart and soul of the book, even more so than the event which gives the book its title.
That event gives the book an exciting start, but it quickly tapers off into day-to-day life, including descriptions of meals and how Rose cares for her own baby son even as she constantly frets about Owen. Further conflict points crop up regularly, but it is far from an action-packed book. Until the ending, that is. The ending was surprising to me, but it also made me enjoy the book even more.
What’s that saying - life happens gradually then all at once? Or something along those lines. That about sums up the pacing of this book, but it’s well done. It shows how every decision makes an impact and how the thoughts people have can snowball into action, even when that action seems entirely out of character.
It’s a quick read, but not a light read. The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach will get you thinking. What makes a good mother a good mother? What makes a bad choice a bad choice, a good choice a good choice? Why do we hold on to some friendships? What is a stable family or relationship? Is there any perfect family? What’s your obligation to family? And so on…
Read it, ponder it, you won’t regret that you did.