Daredevil: The Daring Life of Betty Skelton by Meghan McCarthy (review)

It's safe to guess that few kids in the 1930s were immune to the fascination of airplanes, few, especially girls, had the means to do anything about it. Betty Skelton, though, had the good fortune to live near a Florida naval base and have parents who supported her enthusiasm, so she was in the air before she hit her teens. Shut out of commercial piloting, she took to stunt flying and record breaking, setting a high-altitude flying record, along with several ground-racing and boat-jumping records. Recruited to train for the Mercury manned space flights, she readily matched male recruits but was infamously cut from the program ("NASA wasn't ready to send a woman to space. Not just yet"). Compressing Skelton's many interests and careers into so slim a space leaves little room for development, and her story streaks by in a litany of achievements, save the surprisingly blasé treatment of her NASA disappointment. The transitions are a bit bumpy as well, with Betty going from admiring planes at age eight to flying them illegally at age twelve, with no mention of how she actually learned to fly. Nonetheless, McCarthy is creating a successful cottage industry around nonfiction picture books with reliably interesting, slightly offbeat topics for middle-graders, and when a new title appears featuring her signature characters with eyes popped and grins askew kids can be sure there's somebody here worth meeting. Fun facts and quotes, timeline and bibliography are included to encourage readers toward fuller accounts.