Celebrating Non-Respectable Young Women: A Review of An Impossible Distance to Fall

Eight months after the stock market crash of 1929, 16-year-old Birdie Williams’s father – a banker and amateur pilot – has disappeared along with his plane, leaving behind debts and angry neighbors and former friends in their upscale Long Island town. Birdie’s engagement to David is probably off now, but she has bigger issues to pursue. At an airshow on Coney Island, she sees her father’s plane, but the pilot is part of an aerial circus troupe based in Chicago. On top of that, there are women pilots and wing dancers whose lives promise escape, excitement, and not a little danger – along with the possibility that Birdie may find her missing father. She takes off, literally, with the troupe, and in the following days and weeks finds herself attracted to June, one of the female pilots. But she still dreams of marriage to David and a respectable life back east. After a stunt she plans ends in disaster for everyone, Birdie must decide the future she wants for herself and where her loyalties lie.

Miriam McNamara’s second historical novel, following the action-adventure story of pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny in The Unbinding of Mary Reade, captures perfectly the dark mood of Depression-era New York and Chicago as well as the thrill of the air shows designed to distract spectators from their daily troubles. Those who lost everything and those who seem to have come out on top encounter each other in tense scenes in suburban estates and urban speakeasies (this was the Prohibition Era as well), as well as on the streets. Birdie’s life has been mapped out for her, but now that her father and her money are gone, she encounters a world of unexplored possibilities and the real consequences of failure: exposure, humiliation, ostracism, poverty, and, in the aerial stunts, death. The author raises the stakes through plot turns that keep the reader guessing. An Impossible Distance to Fall is a celebration of brave women who refuse to let their circumstances define them, who follow their heart rather than society’s dictates in love, and who don’t give up despite the odds.