Born to Fly (20 page)

¹
Several thousand Germans and Italians visiting or living in the United States were also detained and sent to camps, but unlike the Japanese internees, these included only non-U.S. citizens.

²
The spies were members of the Abwehr, a true-life German spy organization that successfully planted deep-cover agents throughout the United States as early as 1925.

S
ome years ago I found myself at an air show in upstate New York while working on a TV series about World War Two aircraft. We were shooting a classic plane known as the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a rugged, very American-looking fighter with dark olive paint and a ferocious shark mouth painted on its giant conical nose. The plane had been immortalized in an old John Wayne movie,
The Flying Tigers
, and I remember feeling some childlike excitement at the chance to sit in the cockpit and be Walter Mitty for a moment while we rigged an onboard camera.

As I worked in the cockpit, two children climbed onto the
wing, admiring the historic plane. The girl was about nine or ten, with short blond hair and a defiant stare. The smart-aleck boy, who was relentlessly teasing her, was obviously her slightly older brother. They were arguing back and forth about whether the Warhawk or its sleek descendant, the P-51 Mustang, was the better plane. The girl said she didn’t care what her brother said, she thought the Warhawk was the best, and one day she’d prove it by flying it.

“Girls can never be fighter pilots,” he told her flatly.

I remember that his pronouncement kind of shocked her. She disputed him at first, but when he asked her to name one girl fighter pilot, of course she couldn’t. She climbed down from the wing and drifted off like a deflated balloon.

Several years later, I was teaching sixth-grade English, and a female student wanted to read an action-adventure story with a girl hero. I gave it some thought, recommended a few novels, but realized none of them was really action-adventure. Some had heroines who solved mysteries, witnessed history, or survived hardships, but there were none where the girl got to save the day. By this time I was a father of two girls, and I found myself thinking more and more about that little girl at the air show. A story began to take shape in my mind.

For these reasons, and especially because a ten-year-old girl wanted to fly a P-40 Warhawk and her brother said she couldn’t, I wrote
Born to Fly
.

Michael Ferrari
lives in Avon Lake, Ohio, where he is a teacher.
Born to Fly
is his first novel.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Michael Ferrari

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferrari, Michael (Michael J.)

Born to fly / Michael Ferrari. — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

Summary: In 1942, an eleven-year-old girl who longs to be a pilot and her family try to manage their lives in Rhode Island when the father goes to fight in World War II.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89096-3

[1. Flight—Fiction. 2. Airlplanes—Fiction. 3. Family life—Rhode Island—
Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Sex role—Fiction. 6. World War, 1939–1945—
Fiction. 7. Rhode Island—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.F3644Bo 2009

[Fic]—dc22

             2008035664

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