Falling by T.J. Newman

​    With a title like that and a plane on the cover you know something’s going to go terribly wrong. If they just had a plane and titled it Flying then you’d be in for a doozy of a surprise. So pop some corn and get ready for a high altitude adventure.
   It’s been a while since I’ve read just a purely adrenaline driven thriller for thriller’s sake, not a mystery, not a procedural, not a murder solving thing, just something silly and fun and boombastic. A Michael Bay movie, essentially, though with a more complicated, politically correct and woke morality. Is that a sign of times or just a reflection of the author’s gender? Who knows. Doesn’t matter.
    It was going to be an ordinary day for one ordinary all American family. Bill, the father, was off to do his job and be a pilot and Carrie, the mother, was to stay put and take care of their two kids. It was going to be an ordinary flight too for Bill, a straight through from west coast to the east. But then it all went to sh*t. All of it.
    Now Carrie and the kids are kidnapped and the only way Bill can save them is if he crashes the plane. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also someone on the plane itself, an accomplice. So the pressure is on. Can Bill, the heroic, patriotic pilot save the day?
    What do you think? You know this movie before it’s inevitably made into one, don’t you. It has rousing (Independence day style) speeches and strategically lachrymose moments and principled diligent goodness in the face of evil. It has a freaking baseball game. This entirely production is so American, it just needs a flag, an apple pie and personal arsenal.     
   You know Bill won’t let you down because he’s the good guy and Carrie will hold her own too, because she’s the good woman behind the good guy and also a total motherbear. And you know the flight attendants will prove to be both heroic and awesome, because…well, mostly because the author was a flight attendant herself for 10 years prior to finding success as a popcorn moviebook writer. Seriously, Newman’s own story is way more inspirational than her book, a book she wrote on numerous flights and passed around for 41 rejections before getting a multibook deal with a major publisher. Now that’s kinda awesome.
   The book itself isn’t awesome as such, but it’s really committed to being the best summer high flying extravaganza it can be and that’s quite something. It practically pops its own popcorn at an altitude. You almost have to admire that sort of zeal. And much like all those silly huge productions, it is inherently entertaining. It might be the most amount of fun you can have on a place without Samuel L. Jackson shouting obscenities. It’s definitely all the thing the recent 7500 movie tried to be and failed