DROWNING: THE RESCUE OF FLIGHT 1421 by T.J. Newman
Flight attendant-turned-author T.J. Newman went through quite a struggle trying to send her first novel, Falling, out into the world – and if you read that book, it’s shocking that Newman had so much trouble getting it sold, because it reads like the blueprint for a major Hollywood studio blockbuster. It’s about a commercial airline pilot who finds out his family is being held hostage and will be killed if he doesn’t crash the plane he’s flying. That’s a summer hit for sure. Of course, Hollywood noticed that right away and snatched up the film rights. Same goes for Newman’s second novel, Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, which currently has writer/director Paul Greengrass working on the film adaptation.
Drowning sort of feels like it was already a movie decades ago. Back in the 1970s, there was a four film franchise that consisted of the films Airport, Airport 1975, Airport ‘77, and The Concorde... Airport ‘79, each one having to do something with airplane troubles, and Drowning has the same basic set-up as Airport '77. As Newman acknowledges, without directly naming that film, she covered some familiar ground in this one. The set-up in both Airport ‘77 and Drowning is that a plane crashes in the ocean and sinks with survivors on board. In Airport ‘77, the plane crashed in the Bermuda Triangle. In this book, the plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean just minutes after take-off and sinks, ending up on the edge of an undersea cliff that threatens to drop it even deeper. The people on board struggle to stay alive long enough for the people on the surface to figure out how to rescue them. Luckily, one of the passengers has an ex-wife who is part of a team of professional divers, and she might have an idea on how to get the passengers off the plane and out of the water safely. Making her even more determined to do so is the fact that her young daughter is on the plane – and she and her ex-husband already know the pain of losing a child, because their older daughter died in an accident some years back.
As you can tell, this has “Turn me into a Hollywood blockbuster” written all over it. Falling and Drowning really give the idea that Newman could have had a career writing and selling spec scripts to Hollywood studios... but the problem with doing that is that you never know if the script is actually going to get turned into a movie, or if it’s just going to sit on a shelf in the studio. Writing these stories into novels is a better approach, because at least then they will reach an audience.
Drowning was an enjoyable read, but I didn’t connect with it as much as I did with Falling. Falling, I couldn’t stop reading. Drowning, I had to put more effort into getting through its pages. The characters may have been vivid in Newman’s mind, but they didn’t come across very strongly on the page. I was interested to find out how the rescue situation was going to go, but the thrilling sequences weren’t as effectively thrilling to me as they were meant to be.
Still, it was a decent book, and I look forward to seeing where Newman will go from here. We already know that her next book starts with a plane crash, so her Airport-esque series continues.
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