Flying Lessons & Other Stories Entertains and Inspires

Flying Lessons & Other Stories is an anthology of ten warm and memorable short stories by some of today’s greatest authors of children’s books. These tales were gathered by Ellen Oh, cofounder of We Need Diverse Books, and they will give some kids windows into lives not like their own, and offer others mirrors of their own lives. But any middle grade kid can find something here to relate to, even in the stories that aren’t directly about their own experiences, and there is not a single story that isn’t truly excellent, entertaining, thought-provoking reading.

Kids who love sports are represented in Matt de La Peña’s (Last Stop on Market Street) story, “How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium,” in which a boy is determined to make basketball a path to a better life, and in Walter Dean Myers’ (Monster) deeply moving story, “Sometimes a Dream Needs a Push,” about Chris, whose basketball–star father shows up to give his wheelchair basketball team some crucial coaching.

Though most of the stories here deal with real life issues, there are elements of fantasy included in the mix. One of the most stunning is Kwame Alexander’s (The Playbook) verse story, “Seventy Six Dollars and Forty-nine Cents” about a young Star Wars geek who acquires telepathy, and uses the gift to get the attention of the snooty girl he’s crushing on. Tim Tingle (How I Became a Ghost) contributes an amusing (though potentially fatal) supernatural encounter in “Choctaw Bigfoot, Midnight in the Mountains,” and in Grace Lin’s (When the Sea turned to Silver) “The Difficult Path” a Chinese girl’s education saves her from a horrible arranged marriage when she’s captured by a pirate queen who has a treasure trove of books she can’t read.