The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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We are going to start with business.  I don’t watch much TV, but when I do, I dive head first into loving what I watch.  Pan Am was no different.  Way back in 2011 when it aired, I was still watching TV, so when I heard Christina Ricci was in a period drama, that was likely all I needed.  I’ve seen both seasons and am only sad it didn’t get more (especially now that I’ve finally figured out where I first saw Margot Robbie).  Following my adoration of this show, it was an easy few clicks to recommend Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke to my library the second I heard about it.  Yes, I am that person who wants the nonfiction and the fiction of a period because some days I wing 5 and want to curl up at the bottom of that rabbit hole.  Where I heard about it though, I haven’t the slightest idea and my usual searches landed me nothing.  And yet, we persist.

Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am is a nonfiction title focusing on the stewardesses of Pan Am, an international only airline that was the height of glamor in the 1960s, back when the career options for young women were slim, and the ways for her to see the world were slimmer still.  Cooke does a great job of including the statistics affecting women in the labor force, so we understand just how much our stewardesses have riding on their ability to get and keep their jobs as long as they can… you know, until they get married or age out.  The narrative follows the growth of the airline and the allure of the stewardesses through the decades, focusing on a handful of women who break away from societal norms of early marriage to make a jet-setting life for themselves.  Included are their experiences applying, training, and flying the friendly (and sometimes unfriendly) skies.  Readers also learn of their layovers, stays in foreign countries, and how the political climate of the 1960s and 1970s affected their routes and lives.  Cooke includes the lawsuits brought against Pan Am for discriminating against women who married or were beyond their ideal age, and shows the women she was able to learn about overcoming those hurdles to make lengthy careers for themselves.  She also writes detailed accounts of Pan Am’s support of the military service members who were stationed in Vietnam, including flying rest and relaxation flights all over the Pacific and flying Operation Babylift to evacuate orphans as the North Vietnamese army made its way south.  Cooke wraps up the narrative with a brief discussion of the financial issues that lead Pan Am to cease operations in 1991.  

I really enjoyed getting a well-researched, factual take on the height of Pan Am’s powers, and that of its female staff, featuring several personal stories.  Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am does a great job of highlighting the women who made flying the skies friendlier, how they worked hard, played hard, and lived by their own terms.  As with most of my education of historical women (although I use the term loosely in this case as my grandmother would have been too old to work with them), I am in awe of the chaos they experienced, the barriers they fought, and the paths they cleared for those of us who came along after.  

I’m giving Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am 4 emphatic stars.  Cooke’s writing is journalistic and concise, yet also picturesque when warranted (including the new InterContinental Hotels and landings in Vietnam).  The structure was hard to figure out in the beginning, but then the story she was heading towards made it all make sense in retrospect.  While I am interested in Cooke’s other book The Other Side of Paradise, I am not likely to reread Come Fly the World (I’m much more likely to rewatch Pan Am).  I’ll definitely be interested in what else she wants to research and share with the world, and readers all around it.  

What is a book you were initially interested in because of something else?

~ Nikki 

Julia Cooke is a prolific writer of nonfiction. Her essays have been published in Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. Her journalistic efforts have been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, The Village Voice, The Atavist, Saveur, and more. In 2014, her profile of a young Cuban sex worker won her a finalist place for the LIvingston Award for International Reporting. She’s written about the Portuguese town that inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond and the reason American TV watchers are obsessed with female spies among other intriguing topics. She’s published two nonfiction books, today’s review Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am and The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba  a collection of stories about the daily lives of Cubans. She’s currently working on her third book about Emily Hahn, Rebecca West, Martha Gelhorn, and female wanderlust entitled Restless Women: The Writers Who Made A Place For Women In The World.

What I really loved about Come Fly the World were the stories of the specific women Cooke interviewed for the book. Lynne Rawling, Karen Walker Ryan, Tori Werner, Clare Christiansen, and Hazel Bowie are all former Pan Am stewardesses who gave of their time and memories to bring Cooke’s book to life. Lynne left the science lab in order to fly “for any airline” but her father knew that she would end up flying internationally. Karen grew up in Whittier, California, and “preferred hiking boots to heels” and after getting fed up with the army stationed in Germany decided to travel working odd jobs, until finally her incessant restlessness could no longer be satisfied by anything but the air. Tori chose the life of a stewardess when she realized that work in the Foreign Service required a woman to earn a Master’s Degree and her college friends wrote down “one sentence each detailing Tori’s competence and extroversion, her wit and composure”, all reasons that being a stewardess would be a good fit career choice. Clare, a 5’10” sometime model and theatre student from Ohio, knew that she would love working as a stewardess and sent a letter to Pan Am in 1955 stating: “You’re ordering great big new airplanes, will you take a taller woman, too?” – and they did stretch their height rule one whole inch to hire Clare. And then Hazel, a Black woman from Minnesota, also didn’t care which airline would hire her, as long as it got her a job far away from lakes, cornfields, and snowdrifts. These women each had something to run to, run from, or power them from the inside to go, be, and do more than their female peers. Nothing but a life in the skies and in all the exotic and international locales would do. All five of these women remained with Pan Am long after the average stewardess would leave for marriage, babies, or a career on the ground. 

I, too, am going to give Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am 4 solid stars. I don’t see myself re-reading this nonfiction work, but stories of the ambitious, career-driven women filled with wanderlust will give me fuel for the fire of my own desires. If women of the 1960s and 1970s could find their joy in a career that not only required them to travel, but also paid well and had many perks for off-hours adventures, then I can accomplish my own goals and find my own joy in the year 2024. 

~Ashley

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The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

Darling readers, please note, this is a review of the third book in a trilogy.  Spoilers for the first two books are likely.  Proceed, or don’t, with that in mind.  We’ve also read and reviewed (and recommended) Daughter of the King (Defying the Crown #1) and Daughter of the Shadows (Defying the Crown #2) if you’re interested in where this story begins.  

Also, special thanks to Kerry Chaput and Black Rose Writing for giving us an Advanced Review Copy to read and review here.  As always, all opinions are our own.  You can pre-order your copy of Daughter of Snow and Secrets now to receive it on publication day, March 21, 2024.  You can also check out the trilogy here.  

Let me start out by saying, I love a good series.  I love digging in deep with characters, getting to know them, and then seeing what antics the author has in store for the plot as these (hopefully) beloved characters navigate whatever chaos ensues.  I am on record stating dramatic trilogies scare me because I don’t appreciate the usual cliffhanger of the second book leaving our characters in the worst possible position, so I’m delighted to remind you that darling Kerry Chaput did not leave Isabelle and friends on a cliff at the end of Daughter of Shadows.  This made starting Daughter of Snow and Secrets that much more fun!  We do jump ahead several more years from the epilogue of the previous book to find Elizabeth nearly grown, and bringing her own sort of chaos with her as she asserts herself into the work of saving Protestants.  (If you’re playing along at home, I 100% reread the last couple of chapters in the second book before starting this one.  It greatly helped jog my memory!)

In Daughter of Snow and Secrets, Isabelle is living in Geneva and crossing the border into France to help fellow Protestants escape religious persecution and live in freedom.  Making matters more interesting is the teenage daughter who’s been raised in a Protestant community with parents and found family who are quite active in the Protestant movement and she has recently decided she’s ready to play her part.  We see more of the friends and foes from books one and two, meet a very interesting new character (who Chaput shared she loved writing), and learn a bit about how Isabelle and her husband have been working together to fight for their people, while also trying to protect their souls (not in the religious sense, but more in the maintain some semblance of control of themselves and their hopes for their future sense) and ensure they make it back home at the end of each mission.  It’s an interesting balance to read how they determine when violence is and isn’t warranted, and the push and pull of their internal struggles, as well as how they interact with the rest of their group that made the story feel more real and dimensional.  

Having watched Marie Antoinette on PBS last spring (and having studied French history), I was aware of the opulence of Versailles, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would strike Isabelle, particularly given her family’s struggles in La Rochelle, and the journey that lead her to the filles du roi program and Canada, then back to France.  Even after a chunk of the second book took place in Paris in the palaces there, Versailles was built to be the most extravagant palace, and it clearly struck Isabelle as just that.  As someone who hasn’t been there (but has been to the property that inspired it), Versailles definitely hits differently through Isabelle’s eyes, but still, Chaput’s writing took me back to the show, and my other experiences in the palaces of France, especially the scenes that take place on the extensive grounds.   

Overall, I’m giving Daughter of Snow and Secrets four solid stars.  While I wanted a bit more of a bow than we received, the ending was solid enough.  Chaput’s writing is picturesque, and the characters have a lot of development going on while also working their way through the action of the plot.  Chaput did a wonderful job with Isabelle’s story, and I’m interested in seeing what story lures her in next.

What’s a book you wanted more from when it was over?

~Nikki 

Kerry Chaput is a writer who found published authorship as a second career in her forties. Born in California she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, daughters, and dogs, where she takes to the hiking trails for inspiration. She writes about the varied histories of young women, the bonds of found family, and the power of first love. This is the third historical fiction novel we have read by Chaput, in the Defying the Crown series. Her three other stand alone novels take place in three other time periods all following a young girl’s coming of age journey.

I have really enjoyed spending time with Isabelle Beaumont Boucher née Colette from the Protestant ghetto of La Rochelle, to the wilds of New France and Québec City, to the lavishness of Paris, to the relative peace of Geneva. The trails Isabelle takes find her learning something about herself at every turn. At first it’s her ability to lie to the Sun King about her Catholicism before he ships her off to New France as a Fille du Roi, and to repeatedly keep her Huguenot heart protected by letting no one get to know her in Daughter of the King. Then in Daughter of Shadows, she leans into the warrior ways of the Huron, by standing up for herself and her desires and uses them to manipulate her Catholic lieutenant of a husband, in order to return to France and foil the plans of the man who harmed her family. That husband didn’t end up in a good place by the end of the book either… 

And now, here we are, ten years after Daughter of the Shadows, finding Isabelle married to the love of her life, Andre Boucher, rescuing Protestants from religious persecution in France and traveling with them to safety in Geneva. It’s during one of these rescues that Isabelle’s mercy for one French dragoon – because she will not harm someone who is not actively attacking her people, her family, or herself – that the plot starts to spiral together in a web that started with her being branded with an H on her arm as a child and ends with her being willing to sacrifice herself at Versailles to kill the man who started her on this path to freedom for herself, her family, and her people.

I’m going to give Daughter of Snow and Secrets 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. I loved and adored our newest side character’s arc in this third installment of Defying the Crown trilogy, at the same time I was wary of his shenanigans and when his presence was going to blow up in Isabelle’s face. One of his actions I conjectured did not happen, praise be, but the rest…you’ll have to read to find out! Isabelle finally reaches a place of inner peace and contentment in this story that I had waited for her to realize she could have had at the beginning of the story – but a character’s journey and whatnot had to occur first. It makes a good tale either way. I was frustrated at the semblance of ease in the day to day activities, of finding safe houses, of avoiding soldiers, of creating poisons, of knowing who to speak to and where to be amidst the nobility, etc. Versailles should not have been so easy a place to infiltrate as it seemed – since those gardens are immense (I was there once, in the rain) so perhaps it was easier during Isabelle’s time. It doesn’t mean I can’t momentarily suspend my disbelief for the plot and see Isabelle finally satisfied with her life and her family. I’ll always recommend Kerry Chaput, but Isabelle’s story will probably remain my favorite of hers forever.

~Ashley

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