Book Review: Flight Patterns

Milton resident and New York Times bestselling author Karen White continues her tradition of southern womens grit lit with her twentieth novel, Flight Patterns. For all who love her melodic sentences, powerful sense of place, intermittent seeds of forgotten history and the ebb and flow of hope and heartache in the lives of her characters, Flight Patterns will not disappoint.

Leaving secrets and family behind, Georgia Chambers flees from her hometown of Apalachicola, Florida and promises herself and her sister, Maisy, she will never come back. Ten years after her departure, James Graf walks into the New Orleans auction house where Georgia has become renowned for her knowledge of antique china. His grandmother recently passed away, leaving behind a mostly complete set of china with a unique, bee flight pattern motif, and he needs to know its value. Success matters, not only to quench the curiosity factor, but more importantly because determining the value will mean James will award the lucrative sale of the entire estate to the auction house where Georgia works. After an exhaustive search through available reference catalogs in which the mysterious design is not found, Georgia remembers she has seen the pattern before, a long time ago, in her mothers closeton a soup cup. Though she was just a little girl, she remembers her mother putting her fingers over her lips and making Georgia promise never to tell. She remembers it made her mother so sad that she was again taken away.

Left with no other choice but to find the soup cup, Georgia breaks her promise and goes home. Told in the voices of the three Chambers women, Georgia, Maisy and their mother, Birdie, Flight Patterns begins its ascent into a rich plot of families and secrets, history and heroes, bees and their symbolism, mistakes and painful memories, keys and locks and the complications of their layered interactions.