Broke and knocked up, Mattie Wallace has all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags, and nowhere to go. Try as she might, Mattie can't deny that she's turning into her late mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn't make. When Mattie gets news of an inheritance left by a grandmother she's never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. She leaves the Florida Panhandle for her mother's birthplace: the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There, she learns that her mother remains a local mystery-a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and soon it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother. And if Mattie can discover what started her mother's downward spiral, perhaps she can figure out a way to stop her own.

Author Biography

Melissa DeCarlo was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and has worked as an artist, graphic designer, grant writer, and even (back when computers were the size of refrigerators) a computer programmer. The Art of Crash Landing is her first novel. Melissa now lives in East Texas with her husband and a motley crew of rescue animals.