skygiants

Sherri L. Smith's Flygirl is definitely making my list of top YA novels read this year. The book's narrator is Ida Mae Jones, a light-skinned black woman in the 1940's whose father taught her to fly (and love) airplanes, but who was denied her pilot's license because she's a woman. When war breaks out, she loses her brother to the army, but she gets her chance to fly - the US Army has started supporting a division of Women's Airforce Service Pilots (or WASP) to transport and test-fly army planes and free up male pilots for combat duty. Of course, in the segregated US Army, the WASP isn't going to accept a black woman, but Ida Mae is just light enough that she thinks maybe she can get away with passing in order to get up in the air.

You guys know I have a weakness for books about women passing as men in all-male disciplines, and in one way this felt very familiar to me - Ida Mae's constant fear and awareness that she has to perform at all times, the small subterfuges and the genuine friendships that nevertheless might dissolve at any time if the truth came out, all resonate with that genre. But there are ways in which the stakes in this game are much higher, and Sherri Smith doesn't flinch away from any of that. As a white woman, doors do open to Ida Mae, but she can't acknowledge any of the people who are most important to her (there's a scene where her mother comes to visit her at her training that is pretty heartbreaking), sometimes she's completely boggled by the disconnect between her experience and the privilege her new white friends express, and she's well aware that the longer she decides to continue as "Jonesy" the flygirl the more she'll lose her connection to her family. At the same time, the WASP themselves are fighting for legitimacy and recognition in an army that won't guarantee them jobs after the war or even pay for their funerals in the line of duty, because they're not officially commissioned officers. The choices are never easy, and Smith does a really good job balancing all the different forces at work in the story - racism, sexism, privilege conscious and unconscious, family history, ties and responsibility to friends and family and country and Ida Mae's own need to be in the air.

It's also just a really good story. Smith has done a ton of research (the book started as her master's thesis) and portrays the time period and the training that Ida Mae goes through and her eventual army service incredibly well. Ida Mae is also a fantastic narrator, and the characters that surround her (especially her fellow WASP trainees, upper-class Jewish girl Lily Lowenstein and carny wing-walker Patsy) are also really strong. (