I think this is one of the best novels on the spring list.

Ida Mae Jones needs something more than what she’s got. Her daddy died in a farming accident, but before he did, he taught her to fly his crop duster. Ida Mae dreams of going to Chicago where a special flight school won’t turn her away because she’s black and a woman, but in the meantime, she’s stuck in Louisiana, cleaning houses and helping her mother take care of her brother Abel. Her older brother Thomas is away serving as a field surgeon for the colored infantry, his medical schooling temporarily abandoned.

But the war isn’t going well, and the Army needs its pilots to go overseas to fight rather than stay in the US ferrying planes back and forth. A celebrated female pilot has convinced the Army to train women pilots to ferry planes in a program called the Women Airforce Service Pilots – and Ida Mae decides that this is how she can fulfill her dreams of flying full-time. The problem, once again, is that Ida Mae is black – and the Army doesn’t want black women flying in the WASP program.

But Ida Mae’s daddy came from a line of black women who had married white men and married their children to white men, passing those genes down from generation to generation until her daddy came out as white as any white person could be. His mother expected him to marry a white woman, thus elevating his family in the world. But Ida Mae’s daddy fell in love with her Mama, a black woman, and was cast out by his family. He passed his genes on to Ida Mae (along with his name) and she decides to paste her picture into his pilot’s license and see if she can pass for white and become a pilot.

Ida Mae’s mama is horrified at the lengths her daughter will go to, but Ida Mae is determined to make this happen:

Somebody has got to do something. So I went. I put my name on Daddy’s license and I went and got an interview. And you know what? I wasn’t hiding anything when I went into that room and sat face-to-face with an actual woman Army Air Force pilot. And do you know what she saw? Not a Negro woman, not a white woman, not a high yellow. But a pilot, Mama. A good pilot that they need. Don’t you see? This is what Daddy used to fly for. The chance to be everything other than the color of his skin.

Mama hopes that Ida Mae will not be accepted, but she is – and with a little help from her grandfather, she is soon off to Texas for training. She is terrified, all the time, that she will be discovered, and fears that every person she met can see the truth of who she is. But soon she’s making friends, and learning to fly the Army’s machines, and slowly her fears of discovery begin to ease.

But when tragedy strikes first the WASP and then her own family, Ida Mae has to decide if continuing to deny her heritage, her genes, and her family is worth what she is getting in return.

~

I am in love with this book. Stories of women defying the odds at a time when those odds seemed stacked against them feel especially relevant to me in this historic election year. (In fact, when I finished it, I made another donation to Obama’s campaign.)

Ida Mae is an exquisitely drawn character, full of nerve and spunk and fear and love and curiosity. She makes mistakes – lots of them. She learns from most of them. She serves in the Army not out of love for the country that considers her an inferior being, but for the love of flying. And it’s that love of flying that just leaps out of this book.

The conflict that Ida Mae feels, the battle she wages daily inside herself elevate this book beyond standard historical fiction. It asks difficult questions: how far would you go to live your dreams? How much of yourself can you give up, can you deny, before who you are fundamentally is lost for good? Will your family forgive you if you act in a way that they believe is wrong? How much can you be expected to do for a world that does not appreciate your actions, or accept your offers of help?

And when you go home again, after living a life that goes against everything you were raised to believe and be proud of, can you ever go back to being the person you used to be?

Should you?

If Ida Mae’s crisis of identity and her battle with her conscience do not change the way you look at the world, at least a little, then you should go back and read the book over until it does.

Publisher: Penguin

Pub Date: January 22, 2009