The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Forester

Piper McCloud was born knowing how to float, and she did most of the time. When she got older, she taught herself to do more than float, to actually fly. Her parents were troubled by this, and as a result, kept her from going to school or interacting with other children because they were afraid what others would say.

But when Piper got older, her parents took her to a picnic, cautioning her to keep her feet on the ground. For the first time, Piper got to meet other children her age and to make friends. But during a baseball game, Piper flew to catch the ball and became an overnight sensation.

People came from far and wide to see her, including a woman named Dr. Letitia Hellion. She took Piper away to a special school to learn to use her abilities, with other children who were similarly gifted. Piper hoped that she would make friends there, real friends who shared powers like her own.

But when she gets to the school, she's in for a big shock. The school is full of nasty, backbiting kids who seem determined to see the others fail. Dr. Hellion asks Piper to keep her flying abilities secret for now, but she fails at that on her first day when a boy named Conrad Harrington, a supergenius who makes the adults and other children afraid of him, takes away another boy's project and sends it floating up near the ceiling. Piper stacks desks and chairs to reach it, and eventually just flies up the extra few inches she needs to grab it. But this seems to focus Conrad's hatred and anger on her and he tries to bully her.

Piper tries not to let him get to her, but when he throws a bird her father carved for her into the incinerator, she finally loses her temper and clobbers him. In the attempt to retrieve her bird before it is destroyed, she enters one of the other levels of the school, to find out the horrible truth about the place: they are taking children with abilities to make them lose them, and to destroy any animal or plant with similar changes. Why? Because these things make people uncomfortable, and to be normal is to be safe. Piper rescues a black cricket and brings it back with her to the school. There, Conrad reveals to her what he has known all along, and his plan for her and him to leave this dreadful place.

Piper, however, refuses to leave without the other students, and manages to talk them into helping with Conrad's plan using their own abilities. But can a group of gifted children, even determined, gifted children, prevail against the powers of adults with guns and other weapons? Or is there another way out that they hadn't concieved?

This is a wonderful book. Piper is an optimistic, determined little girl with a special gift that both gives her joy and causes her innumerable problems. Just by being who she is, she gets the other students, who have been drugged into complacency and forgetting their powers, back to who they are and enables all of them to make a change for the better in their lives. She even ends up getting Dr. Hellion to open up, and brings the kids out of the dungeon of the school and into the light of day.

But to do so, Piper has to go through some very dark times, and risk alienating the people who she loves most, her parents. The ideas of whether it is better to wear a mask and conform, or be yourself and possibly be rejected, is explored, along with the realization that when you wear a mask for long enough, you become the mask, and it becomes you, and when you wear a mask, you are being shallow and not true to yourself, and explores Dr. Hellion, who decided to don a mask, then shows what damage that mask did to herself and others.

This book shows kids why they should be themselves, even if they might be rejected, and is a wonderful book for any child nearing or at puberty. Teens, too, could benefit from this book, even though it is generally classed a child's book, and the protagonist is only eleven or so (The book doesn't make this clear, but it doesn't really matter: the story is universal). I recommend this for any child, and even for parents, too.