Cabin Fever

April 15, 2015
A former Virgin Airlines flight attendant's steamy recollections of international binge drinking, obsessive shopping, and a host of affairs. The latest in a long line of flight attendant literature beginning with the irreverent Coffee, Tea, or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses (1967), Smith's debut memoir (co-written with Stow) recalls her time shagging and shopping her way around the world as a young sky waitress. This one features a level of sophistication relative to Geordie Shore and Sex in the City. When not relating high-altitude tales of annoying passengers, randy pilots, silly stewardess high jinks, or near-emergency inflight incidents, Smith regales readers with soft-core sexual details of the many physically dynamic but intellectually dim hunks she bedded over the years. At first, the author's sexual escapades were mostly limited to long-term relationships with men in the flight industry; her ultimate goal seemed to be joining the "mile high club" via sex in an airplane at 5,000 feet (Smith's induction ceremony took place precariously in a tiny Cessna). Yet much of the book also consists of Smith and her stewardess sisterhood either going gaga over muscle-bound millionaires or being picked up by all manner of desperate creeps while quaffing cocktails and partying nonstop in bars and hotels from New York to Johannesburg. Although Smith's portrait of herself throughout is (presumably unintentionally) as a figure of fun and easy ridicule, there comes a point in her marriage-minded mid-30s that she actually ends up a figure of pathos. After being cruelly used by a succession of millionaire jerks, readers may feel some respect for her when she finally lowers her ridiculous standards and marries a guy who sells gym memberships. The literary equivalent of a wet-T-shirt contest, despite the bittersweet ending.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.