Flight of Dreams

December 7, 2015
For her second outing, Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress) once again reimagines a front-page news event, filling in the entertaining backstory with passion, secrets, and nail-biting suspense, this time taking on the disastrous crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. Using the actual passenger list from the doomed airship, the author has concocted a romance between two key crew members, Max Zabel, one of the ship’s navigators, and Emilie Imhoff, the first German stewardess hired for an airship. Since the definitive cause of the Hindenburg’s demise remains a mystery, Lawhon has conceived a plausible explanation that involves an act of revenge against one of the crew members, who, in World War I, flew the airship that bombed London and killed an American passenger’s brother. The tale is fleshed out with other characters, including a lively acrobatic entertainer named Joseph Späh; a journalist, Gertrud Adelt, whose press credentials were recently revoked by the Nazis for her outspokenness; and the cabin boy, Werner Franz, whose trip on the Hindenburg was more of a passage to adulthood than he ever could have imagined. Lawhon threads many stories together, connecting passengers and crew and bringing behind-the-scenes depth and humanity to a great 20th-century tragedy—even though we all know the Hindenburg’s fate.

October 1, 2015
An Agatha Christie-style page-turner exploring the unsolved mystery of the 1937 Hindenburg explosion. As Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress, 2014) charmingly explains in her Author's Note at the end of this novel, "If you're going to call bullshit on historical events, you'd best have a good theory to offer as an alternative." What she questions and upends in her speculative version of what happened between the takeoff of the Hindenburg from Frankfurt, Germany, on May 3, 1937, and its disastrous landing three days later in Lakehurst, New Jersey, is the assertion made by survivors that it was "an uneventful flight." Building on a dense scaffolding of biographical and historical fact, Lawhon invents personalities and relationships for key passengers, chooses from the extant theories about what caused the fire, and spins it all into a web of airborne intrigue. Each section is labeled for a different character. "The Stewardess" is Emilie Imhoff, a capable and lovely young widow who's beginning to return the devoted affections of "The Navigator," Max Zabel. "The Journalist" is Gertrud Adelt. She's traveling with her much older husband, her press card has recently been revoked by the Nazis, and she's missing her baby son terribly, but she's distracted from her worries by suspicions of a bomb threat as well as by a scheming, sketchy character called "The American." Then there's the adorably awkward 14-year-old "Cabin Boy," Werner Franz, whose many responsibilities include taking care of a mysterious unclaimed dog kept in a crate in the cargo hold. Werner's budding romance with a passenger his age is one of the plotlines that amps up the anxiety about who will be among the 62 who survive the explosion and who among the 35 killed. As the disaster inches closer with every chapter]each begins with a countdown in days, hours, and minutes]Lawhon evokes the airborne luxury of the ship]the meals, the cocktails, the smoking room, and the service]in such detail that you end up feeling a little sad that the stately flight of the Hindenberg marked the end of passenger travel by airship forever. A clever, dramatic presentation of a tragic historical event. Suspenseful and fun.

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November 15, 2015

Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress) fictionalizes the three-day transatlantic flight of the German passenger airship Hindenburg before it exploded on May 6, 1937, while trying to dock at Lakehurst, NJ. Although the ship's fiery end (from which came the radio newscast featuring the oft-quoted " Oh, the humanity!") would seemingly not require any more drama, the author escalates the tension with a variety of subplots involving ill-fated romance, increasing prejudice against the Jewish passengers, dark revenge schemes, and--on the lighter side--a hapless cabin boy who ends up in all the wrong places. The chapters alternate from the perspectives of "The Stewardess," "The Journalist," "The Navigator," "The American," and "The Cabin Boy," and the multiple viewpoints, short chapters, and even shorter sentences should keep readers engaged. The crew and passengers and some of the conversations were plucked directly from historical accounts, although they never quite come to life as real people here; the clever banter, elaborate plot twists, and period detail will be appreciated by lovers of historical fiction. VERDICT Readers of Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife or Nancy Horan's Under the Wide and Starry Sky should find this entertaining. [See Prepub Alert, 8/31/15.]--Elizabeth Safford, Boxford Town Lib., MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015

Cofounder of the website SheReads.org, which is affiliated with more than 100 top literary bloggers nationwide, Lawhon follows up The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress with another juicy historical. Here, she reconstructs the flight and fatal crash of the Hindenburg, focusing on crew member Emilie Imhof, who roams the airship from the elegant dining rooms to the engine cars while guarding a secret. She's not the only one. Conspiracy theories abounding then are given shape now; look for promotion building up to the May 6 date of the crash.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.