My review copy of Flight Lessons came with a press-kit interview with Patricia Gaffney in which she sums up her heroine’s faults and virtues and the main conflict of the book. It’s interesting stuff. Unfortunately, those two pages of summary seem more on-point than the first hundred pages of the book itself. There’s some excellent reading to be had here, but it’s burdened by an awful lot of chaff.

Anna Catalano’s world has just crumbled beneath her feet, and the plunge has turned her into a Jennifer Crusie heroine. We meet Anna in mid-stream of consciousness as she fumes amusingly over her faithless boyfriend, her frigid loft, and her newfound empathy for Sylvia Plath. But just as you’re wondering what kind of dog she’ll get and how she’ll redecorate the apartment, a call from her Aunt Iris derails the Crusie train and sends Anna deep into women’s fiction teritory. Anna needs a change of scenery, and her Aunt Rose needs help with the family restaurant. Female bonding’s a-coming up ahead.

Naturally, there are Issues. Sixteen years ago, Anna caught Rose in bed with Anna’s widowed father, and she has never forgiven their betrayal of her mother’s memory. Rose loves Anna like a daughter and yearns for her forgiveness. The restaurant that has been the family business for three generations is failing, and although Anna agrees to help, she insists she’ll only be around for a few months. Rose’s ailing boyfriend Theo doesn’t like the sound of Anna at all, while his birdwatching stepson Mason does.

Ms. Gaffney is a tremendously gifted writer, the author of my all-time favorite humorous romance (Crooked Hearts.) Curiously enough, Flight Lessons falls short in a very gifted-writer kind of way. You’ve probably heard that the writerly ideal is to “show, don’t tell.” This is my first encounter with a book that relies too heavily on “showing” and not enough on “telling.” The author seems to know the characters a little too well, and doesn’t remember to give us enough background so we’ll know them, too. As a writing strategy, this is a major tactical error.

Rose and Anna made me as uncomfortable as if I was visiting a new boyfriend’s fractious family Thanksgiving. From the start, the reader is unceremoniously dumped into a mire of tangled betrayals and pregnant pauses. Rose frets constantly while Anna never misses a chance to twist the knife, long before we know either of them well enough to care. I thought that Rose and Anna’s conflicted longings were going to swamp the book entirely, but about 100 pages in – ping! – Frankie, a delightful secondary character, exploded onto the page. Frankie is a line cook with a buzz cut and a drinking problem, and she breathes new life into the book. I was sorely regretting the compelling heroine she could have been, when – ping! ping! ping! – like popcorn, more and more engaging secondaries bounced into view, all full-fleshed and entertaining. (Mason, Anna’s intelligent but reclusive love interest, is particularly wonderful.) Why couldn’t Rose and Anna be more like that?

This is where the “tactical error” comes in. The reason the secondary characters are so interesting is that we see them through Anna’s or Rose’s fairly objective viewpoints. The heroines’ observations flesh out the characterizations: they tell us how the charcter looks and acts and anything else we might need to know. But there’s no one to tell us about Rose and Anna except Rose and Anna themselves – and they filter each other through highly subjective perceptions. It’s true to life, but it’s not good reading. Around anyone else, Anna can be delightful; around Rose, Anna is a petulant brat. But she doesn’t think she’s a petulant brat, and Rose doesn’t reflect on it either. I knew she was a brat and I wanted affirmation that somebody credible (even an omniscient narrator) agreed with me.

From the press kit, it’s clear that Ms. Gaffney knows just how irritating Anna can be. (“Rose has to learn to forgive Anna for being self-righteous, intolerant, and pretty much a blockhead.”) But that doesn’t come across in the book itself. I know she knows that Anna’s sixteen-year grudge against Rose’s “betrayal” is over-the-top. She explains that the feelings are more intense than you’d expect because Rose and Anna are more mother/daughter than aunt/niece. But I can’t imagine holding a fairly groundless grudge against my mother for sixteen years, either. Anna thinks she’s in the right, and nobody challenges that viewpoint until far too late in the book.

I never warmed up completely to Rose and Anna, but the rest of the characters had me at “hello.” Mason’s funny, intelligent e-mails to Anna left me pining for correspondents lost. The goings-on at the restaurant are frisky and fun to read. Flight Lessons is well worth reading for the spiffy ensemble cast, but it’s carrying too much dead weight to justify the hardcover price tag. The flashes of excellent humor made me long for what might have been; I think if Ms. Gaffney took dead aim at writing women’s fiction that was funny all the way through she could give Jennifer Crusie a serious run for her money. For that, I’d buy hardcover in a heartbeat.