Flying Jenny

This overstuffed novel set in 1929 stars young reporter Laura Bailey and even younger aviator Jenny Flynn. Laura is the only woman reporter in the city room for the New York Enterpise-Post. She’s assigned to cover Jenny’s daredevil attempt to fly under all four bridges linking Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens. The two don’t exactly hit it off, and Jenny soon flies home to Oklahoma. They reunite when Laura is sent west to cover, first, a women’s cross-country flying race that concludes in Cleveland, and then to write about Jenny’s theft of an airplane in Kansas (which, it turns out, was not exactly the case). Their friendship grows as Laura agrees to accompany Jenny and her mentor, Roy Wiggens, on a stunt-flying tour of small Oklahoma towns. A late romance and an even later plotline about the identity of the father Laura never knew feel somewhat forced, and there are some threads that are never resolved. It is difficult to tell whether this is because Tuohy (The Five O’Clock Follies) intends this novel to be the first in a series or if readers will simply be left dangling, but nevertheless it doesn’t read like a completed work. (May)