The Pilot’s Wife, by Anita Shreve
Lyndsay Humphrey
What if the person that you thought you knew better than anyone turned out to have a life that you had no idea about? In The Pilot’s Wife, by Anita Shreve, we follow Kathryn, who loses her husband, a Pilot, while he is flying over Ireland. When the Union knocks on her door in the middle of the night, she almost cannot believe what is happening. The next few days of her life are a total whirlwind in which we see the first steps of grieving.
The loss of her husband is the worst thing that Kathryn can imagine until she finds out what the press is speculating. Parts of the plane were retrieved, they found the voice recorder of the last few minutes of the flight before it exploded. From that, the press speculates that the crash was caused by pilot’s error. This implicates Kathryn’s husband, held responsible for the crash that killed over 100 people. The novel follows Kathryn while she tries to find the reason for the crash and, on the way, finds that Jack had a life that she didn’t know about.
The Pilot’s Wife is a novel that has mysteries around every corner. We learn that two people could live in the same house, but both are in two different worlds. Shreve highlights every facet of the human emotion through Kathryn, who goes from sadness to confusion to anger and everywhere in between. It has the most original storyline that I have read in a while and Shreve writes with an undeniable honesty that grabs readers down to the very core. We know every thought of Kathryn, who develops huge doubts about her husband and who he was. The Pilot’s Wife is a beautifully complicated story about what happens when our world–our lives–are ripped out from under us. It is about the strength of the human heart.