Eleven-year-old outcast Bird McGill feels she was born to fly. Luckily, her father’s work as a plane mechanic gives her the opportunity. In her small Rhode Island town, her imaginative stories aren’t taken seriously, but she really did see an enemy submarine in the bay in 1942. When she and her new friend, Kenji Fujita, try to take its picture, she stumbles onto a corpse and a murderous spy. It is her passion for the P-40 airplane flown by pilots at a nearby airfield that keeps other lives from being lost. Ferrari successfully recreates a time early in World War II, when anti-Japanese sentiment was high and fathers went to war and didn’t always return. Birdie’s first-person voice is convincing, and the narrative moves briskly. With this debut, the author aims to provide the kind of adventure for girls that boys often enjoy in children’s books. Middle-grade readers of either gender looking for suspenseful historical fiction won’t notice that the combination of events adds up to an unlikely story, but they will enjoy Bird’s flight. (Historical fiction. 8-12)
