Dress: Zulily
Top: Kohl's
Shoes: Chase & Chloe, Zulily
Bag: City Streets, J. C. Penney's
Belt: Belt is Cool, Amazon
Mustard bracelet: Cloud 9
Lavender bangle: Don't Ask, Zulily
Sunglasses: Target
"Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high," is a song that every '80s kid knows. Ah, LeVar Burton, "Reading Rainbow," and the wonder of books: good times and good memories! That said, this post is about 1) a butterfly necklace (which, it seems, is a rainbow connection I've made before) and 2) a book about high-flying women. For yes, we have lift-off with Fannie Flagg's The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion.
"Huh?" you may be thinking. "What does a gas station have to do with lady pilots?" I know, I know, the title is misleading. When I first read it, I imagined a nostalgia-fueled saga about a close-knit group of grease monkey gal pals reliving their glory days. (By the way, when I was a toddler, I told my parents that I wanted to be a gas station attendant. These days I won't even pump my own gas. So much for dreams.) But this novel isn't that. Although it is super nostalgic. It turns out that these gas pump-wielding women are sisters and WASPs. No, not bees or White Anglo Saxon Protestants, but Women Airforce Service Pilots, an entity I never even knew existed until I cracked this book. During World War II, these brave broads flew planes to "ferry" them to flight schools and deliver military supplies all over the United States. They went through the same rigorous training as the male combat pilots but faced ridicule and discrimination. As if this wasn't bad enough, flying was dangerous work, and some of them lost their lives. Unfortunately, unlike their male counterparts, the WASPs received no recognition for their heroism, nor veteran benefits for their families. In fact, they were forced to disband when male flight instructors convinced Congress that they were stealing their jobs. Now, I have no desire to conquer the cockpit. But the women who did deserved the chance to do so fairly. Flagg does them justice, deftly and sensitively serving this slice of American history through the trials and tribulations of the Jurdabralinski sisters. When their father becomes ill and their brother goes to war, they take over their family's filling station. Then, they take to the skies. The ringleader, Fritzi, gets her start as an airplane wing dancer. As someone who's not too keen on flying in the first place, I find this mind-boggling. How did she not fall off?!
Still, this book isn't all life and death drama. There's another side to the story. And that's the side where it starts, in present-dayish, small town Alabama where housewife Sookie Poole lives. When we meet Sookie, she's recovering from throwing four weddings as well as dealing with the everyday antics of her larger-than-life mother, Lenore. A paradox of die-hard propriety and madcap rebellion, Lenore is a southern belle gone batty (although not in the clinical sense, unlike her loony bin-dwelling relatives). Sookie is as cautious as her mother is brazen. She worries about everyone's feelings and welfare, including that of the little birds in her yard whose food is usurped by blue jays. A gentle soul to the core, she leads a quiet life. This is why it comes as such a shock when she finds out that she's adopted. And I do mean shock -- a southern lady through and through, Sookie faints upon reading the news in, of all things, a piece of mail. Yet with the help of her husband and a kindly therapist, she puts aside her fears and decides to search for her birth mother. And she discovers that she just may have the DNA of a WASP, showing her -- and us -- that women past and present are capable of all kinds of courage.
Funny and poignant, The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion is a real page-turner, delivering all the warm-hearted and introspective feels that Flagg fans love. It's these qualities that make the WASPs pop, humanizing an unsung and scary chapter in America's story. That said, it's not surprising that The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion is also about family -- and protecting the people you love. I think that's one of the things that most draws me to Flagg's books -- they offer a benevolent worldview and almost everyone in them is good, just like the Luke Bryan song says. They remind you that the world can be kind and that happiness is possible.
I was sad when this one ended.