Musings on The sky is not enough by June O’Sullivan

Keywords: Historical, Women’s Fiction, Irish Fiction, Biographical Fiction, Women in Aviation, Historical figures in aviation, Lady Heath

Genre: Historical Fiction

Length: short medium long

Country: Ireland

Review

I received an ARC of The Sky is Not Enough by June O’Sullivan from BookSirens, and I would like to thank them for this opportunity.

Reading this book has been quite an adventure. First of all, I am genuinely grateful for the chance to discover Lady Heath. We all know Amelia Earhart. She is more than famous. Everyone knows her name. She became the dream and symbol for generations of girls who loved flying and dreamed of becoming pilots. She represents female determination and ambition.

But, as happens so often in history, one name can eclipse many others. Some of those forgotten figures are arguably just as interesting, if not more so, especially because they were the precursors of those who later became legends. The Sky is Not Enough brings forward one of those names: Sophie Catherine Theresa Mary Pierce Evans, later known as Lady Mary Heath. Quite a name, and quite a life.

Lady Heath was very famous in her own time. Born in Limerick, Ireland, her story is fascinating and, most importantly, very well documented. If there is one thing this book deserves real praise for, it is the research behind it. The author clearly did her homework. She manages to reconstruct a complex personal history and to show just how much ambition, determination, and strength it took for Lady Heath to achieve what she did. This, to me, is the book’s greatest achievement: bringing back a historical figure that recent history has largely forgotten and giving readers the chance to truly know her.

I will not go into too many details about Lady Heath herself. I think this is a story worth discovering either through the book or through independent research. However, I do need to talk about the writing choices. I felt that the sections dealing with her childhood and past were significantly stronger than those set in the present timeline. The present-day sections felt strange to me, as if they were trying to balance between a diary-like voice and an omniscient narrator, all while staying in the first person. The result felt unbalanced, and at times I was unsure what the book wanted to be.

This is, of course, subjective, but for my taste those present-day parts were quite choppy. The book touches on sensitive and important aspects of her life, and I felt those sections would have benefited from a more careful, layered, and developed approach. Instead, the writing there felt very straightforward, with short, blunt sentences and a very direct style. I understand that this may have been an attempt to reflect Lady Heath’s personality, but it did not fully work for me. I did not particularly like Mary Heath as a character. I can understand the femme fatale image, the magnetism of a famous woman everyone wanted to engage with, and her many quirks. None of that is a problem in itself. My issue is that I could not tell whether she came across as unpleasant because she truly was, or because the writing framed her that way. That ambiguity made it difficult for me to connect with her in the present-day sections.

That said, setting aside the fact that this particular narrative style was not my cup of tea, I truly appreciate books like this. Stories that recover forgotten pieces of history and give voice to people who paved the way for others are one of the great strengths of historical fiction. Reading about topics you know little about, learning unexpected details, and sharing in an author’s passion is one of the joys of reading.

If you are interested in aviation, women in aviation, female ambition and determination, or historical figures who helped shape the paths others later followed, this book is worth a try.