Three star review, originally posted here on December 31st, 2025:
There was so much potential here. Alas, the book is infuriatingly uneven. This was my first time reading a Fannie Flagg book, though I’ve seen the movie Fried Green Tomatoes a million times. This book is very similar, in that we jump back and forth between two timelines:
1. A very interesting old-timey timeline of really badass women doing cool shit
2. A boring modern-day timeline about an insufferable idiot
In FGT, the modern protagonist was a total sad sack who then found inspiration in the older story and found her inner strength. I think that’s pretty much what we were trying to go for here as well, but it just didn’t work. The #1 issue is that, honestly, this modern protagonist is infuriatingly stupid. At the start I had a lot of trouble getting into the book because we spend pages and pages on this lady fixating on stupid shit like other people’s weddings and feeding her birds. It lasts FOREVER. But I eventually pushed through because I had hopes for the old-timey storyline, plus I figured she would find her inner strength like in FTG, and she’d get less annoying. Gentle reader, this did not happen. She remained just as annoying from start to finish. She eventually learns to eat polish food and she finds out her son is gay, and that’s about it in terms of progress. Oh well!
The old-timey plotline was legitimately interesting, though, and that is what saves this book. We learn all about WASPs (female pilots during WW2), a group made up of legit badass characters with colorful backstories. The problem, though, is that we barely dive into these characters. 90% of the “character development” in this book falls to our modern idiot, leaving just 10% for the old-timey gals. But the old-timey gals were so much more interesting! We barely skim the surface with them, though. I just do not understand the decision-making here.
A heavy-handed editor would have really made this book shine. Chop about 70% of our modern timeline. Honestly, just chop off the last 20% of the book- we just ramble on about nothing for a while after the story itself is complete. And the humor that IS to be found in our bumbling airhead would have shone much better if we didn’t have to endure so much of it.
What DOES work?
1. I did the audiobook, which was read by the author herself. Flagg does a fantastic job here! I’m used to authors reading memoirs, but not fiction. She nailed it. Her comic timing on her own characters was spot-on.
2. Though I would have tweaked the execution, I still liked the idea of how we jumped back and forth between the two storylines. Our modern storyline is about a woman who finds out she was adopted, and our old storyline is about the woman listed on her birth certificate. We’re left to wonder what is going to happen in the old-timey storyline to result in her eventually needing to give up her kid. What a great way to pull readers into the (old-timey) story!
3. The characters are great, and while I found the weight distribution of their development frustrating, I still got a decent sense of who they were.
Helga without the H 