The Pilot’s Daughter: A Novel

In the author’s note included with The Pilot’s Daughter, Meredith Jaeger shares her deep nostalgia for the Jazz Age and the two cities featured in the book: New York and San Francisco. When one of the main characters, Iris, describes the “Great White Way” in New York City, where she danced as a star in the Ziegfeld Follies, I felt like I could practically see it.

The Pilot’s Daughter features two main characters: Ellie, a newspaper secretary whose pilot father has gone missing in World War II, and Iris, her mother’s sister, who has a secret past as a New York showgirl. Receiving her father’s possessions from the Army, Ellie realizes he has been living a double life for all of her’s. Together with her Aunt Iris, Ellie heads to New York to find answers, and hopefully clues that her father is still alive.

While this novel has two main characters, it has multiple secondary characters and a few different plotlines. I have gone back and forth if they were all necessary, or if the story could have been tighter without all of them. Ultimately, I have decided the book is like an onion: there are a lot of layers and you find something different every time you read it.