Flying is such a useful metaphor for all sorts of movement in life, and Jenny Colgan makes the most of this in her book, The Summer Skies, the first in the McIntyre books. (I recently read and reviewed #2, not realizing there was one before it.)

This is the book in which we meet Morag McIntyre, an accomplished young pilot, the third generation to learn to fly in her great-grandfather’s 18-seater Twin Otter prop plane, Dolly, above the windswept archipelago of northern Scotland. The family runs a business that fetches mail, packages, tourists, medicine, and occasionally livestock between islands, a vital lifeline for the sparse population inhabiting them.

Morag is pursuing a life out in the wider world, piloting great airbuses on commercial flights to exotic locales, but one day she has a fraught experience in the air that shakes her self-confidence to the core. One good thing comes out of it when the human resources person who has to vet her return to the cockpit turns out to be the handsome and charismatic Hayden. Despite her secret misgivings about flying again, she is cleared by him and then begins dating him. When Hayden’s office transfers him to Dubai, Morag considers moving with him, but first, news of her grandfather’s illness sends her home to Scotland for a visit. She is pressed into service as co-pilot on a flight to the tiny island of Inchborn—home to a ruined abbey, a bird-watching station, and a visiting ornithologist from Glasgow—where an unexpected delay gives Morag the time she needs to figure out what she really wants, from flying and from life.

I really enjoyed this book. Several reviewers on Goodreads expressed disappointment because it didn’t feel, according to them, like a typical Colgan book, but I would have to disagree. It may have been simpler in plot and more spare with its characters than some (and also lacking recipes), but it felt, nonetheless, like a return to the familiar, which is to say, a trip to the icy but beautiful Scottish isles occupied by quirky characters with life issues to which we can most of us relate.

I will acknowledge one reviewer’s caveats, because they are germane: The research into how pilots are trained for aviation and what they are and are not permitted and/or expected to do (especially regarding switching back and forth between kinds of planes/flying) was incredibly sloppy, and I am surprised Colgan made these kinds of errors. I will also remark (again) about how poorly (and inaccurately) this book was described on Goodreads. (I have written a new summary and am working to get it substituted.) But the focus of this book is also on the relationships, and in that area it was entertaining and felt true to life. And as always with these books set in remote areas of Scotland, I was romanced likewise by the scenery.