Fly with Me

Burke skillfully balances sweetness and heat in her delightful sapphic romance debut. When flight-phobic emergency room nurse Olive Murphy braves her first plane ride in order to run a marathon at Disney World to honor her comatose brother, Jake, medical disaster strikes and she ends up saving the life of a fellow passenger mid-flight. The plane makes an emergency landing in Atlanta, where grateful pilot Stella Soriano offers to drive Olive to Orlando herself—and then asks Olive to pose as her girlfriend so she can use the positive press about the incident to force the airline into the long overdue promotion they’ve been squeamish to offer a gay Latina woman. Olive and Stella’s quirks are both lovingly depicted, sex scenes have a refreshing mix of playfulness and intensity, and the tension between the couple’s insistence on their relationship being for show and their clear joy in being together drives the story forward at a brisk clip. Subplots about familial relationships as Olive visits Jake and Stella helps out her father, who has Parkinson’s, add heart, but the external stressor of Olive’s sabotaging ex, Lindsay, feels like an irksome plot device to add some late-stage conflict. Still, readers will eagerly cheer on the charming central couple. Burke is a writer to watch. Agent: Mariah Nichols, D4EO. (Sept.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review mislabeled the book as a lesbian romance.