Media Presence
Behind Her Smile was featured in London Book Fair in April of 2023.
Behind Her Smile will be featured in Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April of 2024.
Behind Her Smile will be featured in The Harbinger Post Magazine in April of 2024.
Foreword Publicity Correspondence January 2, 2024
Hi Bev,
Congrats! Behind Her Smile: The Adventures of a Tall Girl from WVA and Her Life as a Stewardess has won the Fall 2023 Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards in the Memoir category! View your listing here.
The Pinnacle Achievement Award honors special recognition for an outstanding contribution by an author, or book, to the industry or society at large. Experienced editors and judges select books based on content, quality, writing, style, presentation, and cover design.
If you would like to order a certificate or stickers for your book, you can do so here. I am attaching our tip sheet on how to make the best use of awards.
Congrats again! We are so thrilled for you!!
Thanks,
Aly
Midwest Book Review
Behind Her Smile
Beverly Golden Cuevas
9781684864836, $21.99 Hardcover/$12.99 Paper/$4.99 ebook
Behind Her Smile: The Adventures of a Tall Girl from WVA and Her Life as a Stewardess is a memoir about becoming an airline stewardess and being very, very tall. It’s a story that will resonate with other women who have faced challenges in career and perspective because of their height, but also lends insights into a bygone heyday of flight attendants, when airplane travel was a very different prospect.
As Beverly Golden Cuevas is exposed to the wider world outside of Columbus, Ohio, she expands her knowledge of life, people, and places. From the start, as she enters this strange new world, Cuevas cultivates a wry sense of self-humor that appears in the course of exploration and discovery:
“The instructors told us we had to fly out of three different airports, JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark. In order to get to some of these, you had to use the subway, which was a truly scary experience in itself until you get used to it, which I never did. I had a terrible case of claustrophobia. Yeah, I know, why was I not afraid of airplanes? I guess because they weren’t underground and between two walls.”
From her professional edict to maintain moral and ethical values when providing flight services, to her perspective that all her passengers are her guests, to be treated with equal respect (whether they be money-inducing travel agents or that family that had saved for a special airplane trip), Cuevas cultivates a sense of value and perspective that seems missing in today’s work world in so many ways.
Readers interested in not only the experience of flight attendants in earlier years but in the efforts of one tall, determined woman to realize her ambitions without compromising her life values will find Behind Her Smile replete with not only personal experience, but professional and life assessments that give much food for thought.
There is a world of difference between past and present attitudes – everything from work value to flying the friendly (and, too often today, unfriendly) skies. Cuevas delineates these differences by capturing her life and its flight experiences with a vivid “you are here” feel that likely comes from the fact that Behind Her Smile’s stories come directly from diary entries documenting events at the time.
The result is a memoir that appeals on several levels: as a personal history; a professional assessment of bygone years; and as a testimony to the power of perseverance and growth. Its saga of opening up to the world and maturing into love and experience is revealing and interesting.
Libraries and readers seeking memoirs that hold added value for their blend of personal life events and international flight experience will find Behind Her Smile a fine choice.