Joining the Bookouture Book Tour for The Girl Who Took Flight

I’m excited to join the Bookouture Book Tour for The Girl Who Took Flight, part of The Airline Girls series. I’m pleased to be able to help promote Lizzie Page’s newest novel during its release week.

As a devotee of travel myself, it’s fun to read this series set in those early, glamorous days of passenger travel. So check in those bags and help me celebrate this airline-themed novel.

My review

I  had read and enjoyed the first novel in this series, so I was happy to join the second to follow along on the early days of passenger airline travel in England.

This novel follows Lola Klein, one of three airline stewardesses we meet in the first novel. Lola came to London as a child, an evacuee from Berlin before war broke out. Today, Lola serves as a stewardess and travels around Europe, spends time with her fellow stewardesses and best friends, watches her brother withdraw as he begins to build his new life, and navigates a potential love interest.

But as the Soviet Union places a stranglehold on Lola’s former hometown of Berlin, she observes as airlifts begin to ferry in needed supplies.

Soon enough, Lola is brought in on some of the missions. In doing so, Lola grapples with a return to a country she vowed never to step foot in again and is forced to come to terms with her painful past. The story unfolds between Lola’s present and her childhood within Berlin’s Jewish community, increasingly under threat by the Nazis.

This is an enjoyable and well-researched novel, which can easily be read as a stand-alone. I highly recommend this novel and the series.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy – all thoughts are my own.

Book blurb

Air hostess Lola has made her home in the skies, starting afresh after losing everything. But when her past comes calling, can she face it head on – or will it destroy everything she’s worked so hard for? 

England, 1948. It’s been ten years since Lola arrived from Germany as a scared, trembling Jewish refugee. Even now, she can’t think about the family she lost back in Berlin, or her heartbreak will destroy her.

Instead Lola looks to the future: the new family she’s found working as one of England’s first airline stewardesses, a job she adores, and the butterflies she feels around handsome pilot Brian – even if the thought of opening her heart again terrifies her. But when news of the Berlin Blockade reaches England and the Allies decide to provide supplies to the desperate people of Berlin by air, Lola’s boss offers his fleet to the cause.

Lola’s chest squeezes painfully tight at the thought of putting herself in danger to help the country that took everything from her. But when she sets foot on German soil once more, will confronting her past open up old wounds – or finally help them heal for good?