Flygirl

Just in case anyone thinks that I cannot read a book without loving it, here is a review of one I actually had to force myself to finish.  It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. This one is called Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith.  

Flygirl is about a young African American woman named Ida Mae Jones who passes herself off as white so she can join the WASPS, a women's pilot group in WWII.  It has really good character development with Ida Mae, and tells her back story fluidly along with the actual plot.  It also shows very well her inner turmoil at her decision to "pass" and how it affects her family and friends.  It also deals with her two personal losses, one in back story and one in the plot.  They are both pretty heartbreaking.

The author does a pretty good job of showing how scared Ida is when she faces racism in the town she trains in, and my heart was hammering in my chest every time.  However, I don't think it went far enough.  The whole time I was reading I was waiting for her to get caught, for someone in authority or one of her new friends to figure out that she was not who she was pretending to be.  She never tells anyone, not even when she starts falling for a white man.  The only time it happens is an old African American man in a store, and it was almost an anti-climax.  I know it wasn't the point of the book, and that the point was her flying and achieving her lifelong dream of being a pilot, but the other issue is racism so it should have been much more developed.

And the worst part is, it cannot be used in a classroom situation at all.  It uses the N-word 3 times in one chapter.  It would never fly in a school.  It doesn't matter if the word has historical use or needs to be included in a scene about racism, because of that one word, it would not be approved for school use.