In Fly With Me by Andie Burke, Olive is a nurse who is terrified of flying. Her first time on an airplane is awful, but when a fellow passenger has a medical emergency, she jumps into action and saves his life. However, people are filming her, and the video of what she did gets put on the internet. The airline is delighted by the good press, and one of the pilots on her flight—a gorgeous woman named Stella—approaches her, offering to help her get to her next destination since they had to make an emergency landing. Soon after this, Olive and Stella strike a deal: Stella is up for a huge promotion and wants to capitalize on the good publicity, and Olive finds herself agreeing in spite of her misgivings. Stella is way out of her league, after all, and there’s no way this will turn into a real romance. Even so, Olive lets herself grow closer to Stella, even though she knows she’s risking her heart.

I’m at the point in my life where I have no idea how people listen to audiobooks at the usual 1x speed (barring sensory processing issues, of course), because I always speed mine up nowadays.

Anyway, this was a cute story, overall. The premise of pretending to date is one I’ve seen several times in romcom books, and this take on it really isn’t that original. And honestly, the way this trope was used in this book was pretty annoying. Really, the farce should have been dropped like halfway through the book, considering the feelings on both Stella’s and Olive’s parts. It would have allowed the narrative to focus on the real drama and not on their ridiculous lack of communication.

Because the other storylines—Olive’s family drama surrounding the care of her brother, Stella’s father’s health issues, and the unpleasant men running the airline—are much more interesting than the romance. They’re definitely more serious topics, but I feel like this was the real heart of the story, seeing how these two characters dealt with these things, both individually and as a team. I was really invested in seeing what would happen to Olive’s brother especially, even though it’s a truly heart-breaking part of the story. Unfortunately, the narrative is so focused on Olive and Stella’s romance that the brother storyline kept being pushed aside, even when it really should have taken center stage.

Not to say I didn’t like Olive and Stella as a couple. They have great chemistry, their banter is fun, and the way they support each other is nice. I just wish they had communicated better overall. The moments they’re on the same page are great, and there needed to be more of them. I feel that if I had been Olive’s friend Isaac, I would have meddled—in the sense that I would have told her to stop being a fool and to just talk to Stella like a real person, not like a character in a middling-quality romcom. Oh, wait.

In the end, Fly With Me is decent, but not amazing. Some elements are handled really well and have tons of emotion, but others are just frustrating. The romance is fine sometimes, irritating other times. The balance of serious topics and romantic drama isn’t great, though admittedly I did want to find out what happened in general. So while I wish this had been better, it wasn’t bad.

A note about the content: there are several scenes that deal with being a caregiver to an ailing family member, having to make end-of-life care decisions, and also about having mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.

Fly With Me will be published on September 5th, 2023!