Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History

If someone asked you to name a female aviator, Amelia Earhart is likely to be the first and only name out of your mouth. Her accomplishments and the mystery surrounding her death is a beacon for attention and speculation. Popular history has forgotten there were other women with their eyes turned to the clouds in the early days of aviation. Keith O’Brien’s Fly Girls takes aim to remind everyone there is more to aviation history than just the ill-fated Earhart.

His ambitious work resurrects the lives and accomplishments of Louise Thaden, Florence Klingensmith, Ruth Elder, and Ruth Nichols alongside Amelia Earhart’s story. They are portrayed in an honest and unvarnished light, not as adored Madonnas or beatified saints. These aviators are shown as they were: dirt-covered, oil-stained, and driven to fly. O’Brien doesn’t shy away from painting a vivid portrait of the obstacles standing in their way.

This is not a book where the names, dates, and facts of one subject are presented in a long continuous stream before moving onto the next. Fly Girl’s narrative is broken up into vignettes detailing the rise, fall and, in some cases, resurrection the five women’s careers. When one woman’s star was rising, another’s was falling. At times, the women came together, working toward the common goal of furthering the credibility of “The Aviatrix.” O’Brien takes time to show a global perspective of the 20s and 30s and how that impacted our heroines.

In my last book review, I said I did not delve much into the realm of non-fiction, and here I am reviewing another non-fiction book. It just happens to be a coincidence. I found O’Brien’s Fly Girls by scrolling through the Goodreads choice awards. Libby, an app used by my local library to provide digital services, happened to have the audiobook version, so I put a hold on it. The wait was about four weeks, but well worth it. Maybe my non-fiction taste runs exclusively to those tomes reclaiming lost history. Fly Girls was a fascinating listen on my morning run and commute to/from work. I kept turning the book on, needing to know what was going to happen next. Sure, I could have Googled the fate of each of the aviators, but that wouldn’t have been the same thing. The book flew by. Waka waka.

What I liked most about this book isn’t the history reclamation aspect of the book, and that was brilliantly done by the author. The best thing about this book I couldn’t get from browsing Wikipedia pages. O’Brien illustrates a group of women locked in a competitive career, but they are a group who actively work as a collective. These women, while chasing personal success, were keenly aware of the fact none were an island onto themselves. One woman’s failure reflected upon the group as a whole. So often in the news and on TV, women are pitted against each other, making women their own worst enemy rather than as the best ally. Fly Girls shows readers that doesn’t have to be the case. It gives us an example to refute the frienemy stereotype.

The audiobook version of Fly Girls is not narrated by the author. Instead, they opted for a female narrator, Erin Bennett. Her tone captured the suspense and excitement in each story perfectly. The audiobook runs just over eleven hours long, but the short story style organization makes it manageable to pick up and put down again. I went to look up how many pages the physical book has, which is 352, but I found an interesting tidbit to distract me.

There are two versions of Fly Girls. One for adults and one for young readers. The recommended age group for the young reader’s edition is the third or fourth grade. The women within these pages and their hard-won accomplishments should be added to the female narrative in mainstream history. Breaking down a larger research piece into children accessible content is a great way to start adding more voices and faces to that narrative.