THE STEWARDESS by Julia Percivall (Avon 1973)

This novel relates the "adventures" of Betsy, a redheaded stewardess, on two round-trip flights between New York and London. It's good enough in certain regards that its shortcomings are especially confounding. Betsy and the other stewardess characters are delineated well enough to be interesting to read about, if only their encounters and adventures were interesting. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Betsy spends the whole first third of the novel nannying a poor little rich kid who's flying alone from one wealthy divorced parent to another. Worse, the kid's father doesn't even come in a timely manner to collect him at the airport, so she continues to keep the child company for almost the entirety of her stay in London. Fucking dullsville. On the flight back to New York, she broods sadly over a the unhappiness of a melancholy starlet flying in first class. Boooring. Once back in New York, we find that her boyfriend is some creepy egomaniac of an artist who always puts her down, which is far from enjoyable to read. Nothing of any note happens on the next flight to London or back. Then she breaks up with her boyfriend, and he gets abusive and stalkery, which is even less fun to read about. Then she gets the flu, and spends a ridiculous number of pages feeling miserable in bed and lurching to the toilet to get sick. Not exactly what I imagined when the back cover blurb promised a peek into the "swinging singles apartments . . . where the stewardess spends her off duty hours!"

Ye gads, there are two more novels in this series. Here's hoping Betsy's life starts to move in a more swinging direction! Sadly, that doesn't seem too likely, since she ends this novel practically engaged to a stick-in-the-mud father-figure pilot. Ugh.

By the way, that's Robert McGinnis cover art that some fucking douchebag defaced with a price sticker--as if there weren't room anywhere else on the cover for it to go. Christ, I swear, some fucking people!