"The Girl Who Could Fly"
Review by Swordfish
Because of its good plot, this fable by Hollywood screenwriter Forester would work better as a movie.
The premise - that people are occasionally born with super powers - is the same as that of the X-men movies, and if you enjoy those movies, you'll probably enjoy this 328-page novel (though conservatives may be slightly irritated by the liberal messages).
Piper, the 9-year-old girl of the title, lives in a liberal's idea of hillbilly society, in which they talk like Huckleberry Finn and are all, except for Piper, simple-minded (which here goes along with being religious).
Like Huck against slavery, Piper is against the close-mindedness of her society, which is suspicious (at best) of anything remotely abnormal. And Piper is abnormal in two ways: She is inquisitive, and she can fly.
If you've seen the X-men movies, you'll remember that they feature three factions: 1) the X-men, who run a school that trains mutants (those with super powers) to be super-heroes; 2) the bad guys camp, which recruits mutants to be super-villains; and 3) the rest of society, which is mostly bigoted against anyone who is different.
In "The Girl Who Could Fly," the first two factions don't exist.
As in the X-men, Piper is taken away to a top secret school for kids with super powers; but unlike the movies, this school exists for the sole purpose of taking away super powers.
Some excerpts:
Bella is the first child Piper makes friends with:
"Bella was endowed with an unrelentingly sunny and effervescent disposition, which was in no small part due to the fact that her mother was a painter, her father was a sculptor, and she'd grown up on an organic communal farm in the San Francisco Bay area, where she was daily pummeled with massive amounts of unconditional love. This had left Bella without a mean bone in her body and enough positivism to single-handedly reverse global warming." (page 92-93)
Comment: While art can be a wonderful thing, liberals give it more credit than it deserves; Bella's good disposition is credited in part with the fact that both her parents are artists.
Other reasons for Bella's disposition include: 1) Growing up in a commune, 2) Growing up in a commune that is ORGANIC, and 3) Growing up in commune in the Bay area.
Add to this the liberal buzzwords "unconditional love" and "global warming."
Global warming is mentioned again in the dreams of two other kids in the "school":
"Nalen and Ahmed's grand plans were so detailed that they had already selected a name for their company, Mustafa Weather Solutions, and had a business plan that included a bread-and-butter base of helping farmers get rain, as well as dabbling in government contracts to reverse global warming." (page 202)
Young Conrad's power is super-genius:
"His mind - all-powerful, brilliantly calculating, analyzing, processing - didn't have the answers. His mind, Conrad realized all at once in a luminous flash of understanding, had information, not answers." (page 258)
"...[Piper] threw her arms around him and ecstatically squeezed him and laughed out loud.
'Yeeee-hawwwwww!!!!!!!!' Piper jiggled Conrad in the embrace, and he wondered if the news had completely made her take leave of her senses.
'I thought I was wrong. I thought I couldn't trust my heart, but I can. I can. There's not a thing wrong with my heart!!' (page 280-281)
Comment: This follows the liberal philosophy "follow your heart." First Conrad, the genius, is shown that he can't trust his mind. Then Piper discovers that she CAN follow her heart.
If you can overlook the liberalism and the utter implausibility of a CIA-like organization that is interested not in harnessing super powers but rather destroying them, the story is enjoyable.