Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Hadley's running late for a flight she doesn't want to be on. Her father is getting remarried and her mother has convinced her to be there. She misses the flight and is booked onto the next one. Sat one seat away from a boy who gallantly helped her with her suitcase.

Air travel is a funny old thing and you do develop odd friendships with the people next to you, if only for a few hours. The chances are you will never see them again but for the duration of your flight it's you and them. I know people that have jokingly had aeroplane romances, although I have never been lucky enough to be seated next to Hot Single Bloke, sigh. So the premise of SPoLaFS was an attractive one, a love story set aboard a transatlantic flight.

It's rather a short book and not a lot of it is actually spent on the plane. Hadley kind of spends a lot of the flight asleep! The story is interrupted by flashbacks dealing with the break up of her family and this is really the central to the book. She's grown apart from her father, blames him for ruining everything yet slowly learns that relationships and love aren't always logical. A young adult protagonist in these situations often annoys me, she is selfish and bitter in her thoughts but then she is probably a realistic portrayal of a teen response. I was hoping for a sweet and clever tale about the transience of acquaintances and therefore was a little disappointed.

I do wonder when the last time the author took a transatlantic flight or if she just flies with bad airlines. They only had a choice of one film on board, a cartoon aimed at children and Oliver felt he had to leave money behind for the alcohol he stole, implying that it wouldn't have been free. There wasn't even that endless cycle of being fed. I am sure a lot of the target audience will never have flown long-haul, so it really won't matter but if it were a little bit truer to life I would have said this was a perfect book to sell at airports.