My Amazon and Goodreads review of Prepare for Departure by Mark Chesnut (Rating 5) – Mark Chesnut’s Prepare for Departure is a romance memoir about his dual love for aviation and his mother. Chestnut is an erstwhile misfit who fits in the air and on the page, a seasoned traveler as well as a talented author. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciate his ability to simultaneously focus on characters worth caring about, and the complex settings they inhabit. Written with devotion, humor, and honesty, Prepare for Departure regales readers with stories of Chesnut’s outsider status: A flight-obsessed child among earth-bound classmates; a boy with conservative southern roots living in the liberal north; a gay Caucasian man with an Hispanic husband in a straight white world; a fatherless son raised by a feisty mother who was wary of breaching the norms she herself had escaped. “Time traveling” between childhood memories and his mother’s final decline, Chesnut’s memoir invites readers aboard to laugh and grieve with him. Fasten your heart lest it burst out of your rib cage by the time you land.
