Operation: Nebraska Author- The Clearwater House

I’m not exactly sure what genre to label the next book in my Operation: Nebraska Author project. The Clearwater House by Tammy Marshall could be labeled modern historical fiction if it weren’t for the paranormal elements of the story. It could be marketed as a romance, except the love story isn’t the focus. You could say it’s a mystery and leave it there, and while it is, it is so much more. Let’s work through this together.

Lillian is dissatisfied with her life.

She works at a job she neither loves, nor hates, she’s dating a guy she’s not sure she even likes anymore, and she rarely gets time to do the one things she really loves: painting.

Until a lawyer shows up at the art museum in Omaha, NE where she works informs her that she has inherited a house in Clearwater, NE from a woman that she had never heard of.

A woman who was still alive.

The mysterious woman combined with the fact that Lillian’s mother’s family was from the Clearwater area, her grandfather still lived there, and her desire to make some important decisions about her job, her boyfriend, and her art, made Lillian decide to get away from Omaha for a weekend.

Once she arrives in Clearwater, Lillian pays the lawyer a visit. In addition to the keys to the property, he gives her an escape plan. If she ended up not wanting the house, she’s not stuck with it. The house will revert back to the owner who will dispose of it another way. The one clause was, she had to spend time in the house before she decided to keep it or not.

Lillian is intrigued by the house as soon as she sees it. It is an old two-story farm house with a porch on the front, surrounded by trees with outbuildings and a stream bubbling nearby.

Almost as soon as Lillian steps into the house, strange things start happening. She feels faint while walking down the hall and imagines she sees the original wall paper and décor. When she sets up her painting in a room upstairs, she is pushed by an unknown force to paint scenes she doesn’t know and doesn’t remember doing.

She pushes it from her mind when the welcome distraction of the handsome Jake from across the road comes to introduce himself. Jake, recently divorced, is helping on the family farm until he figures out what his next step is. There is an instant attraction and he invites her over to his home for dinner and to meet his father and son.

By the time she leaves Clearwater that first weekend, Lillian has one question in her life figured out. Dump her boyfriend.

She returns the next weekend loaded down with more canvases and a burning desire to figure out just exactly what was drawing her to the farmhouse.

She takes Jake up on his offer to his spare room and spends the weekend with his family and painting more pictures. The first few were of a young girl and of a serious woman who, depending on the painting, was pregnant. The number of them grew as well as added a man to the trio. With each painting, Lillian is no closer to figuring out what was happening to her, but her need to know grew.

Lillian’s connection to the house is both solidified and confused even more when she brings her grandfather for a visit. She tells him about some of the strange happenings and shows him her paintings that are obviously of the house but are of people she doesn’t know. Paintings she doesn’t remember creating.

Her grandfather is surprised to find that the serious woman is his mother and the man is his father, people he knows Lillian has never met, nor that there were any pictures of.

Lillian decided to cash in her four weeks of vacation to spend more time at the house and to meet the woman who left it to her. She made arrangements through the lawyer to meet with Dorothy, Clearwater’s first librarian, and owner of the house. Lillian decides to take one of the paintings with her. A painting of the young girl.

She was pregnant.

The meeting did not go the way Lillian expected. She went there wanting answers. All she found was a haunted, old woman, black and white photos of her grandfather as a boy, and more questions.

The trances Lillian was pulled into when she painted the scenes of the house grew worse until the voices beckoned her even in her sleep across the road at Jake’s. More than once, Jake or his father Gerald, found Lillian in the house with her having no memory of going over nor how long she had been there.

Then, the paintings began changing. She would leave for the night with one half-finished and it would be complete in the morning. They even started changing when people were looking at them, begging for their story to be told.

Eventually, all was revealed.

A woman desperate to have a child but cursed to lose every one she conceived. A lecherous husband with a wandering eye. A young woman, who simply wanted to be loved, to have a place in the world, but was only taken advantage of.

And the tragic endings they suffered.

While I found some of the writing a bit formal for fiction and much of the dialogue wooden, the story more than kept me intrigued. The trances that Lillian was pulled into to make the paintings, the ghosts who did all they could to have their story known, and the surprise ending held me until the very last page.

After thinking about it while writing this review and flipping through the book again, I think the best label for The Clearwater House is paranormal fiction with elements of family drama and romance. But, as with any story, it is more than its label.

It is about a young woman struggling to find her path in life and the tragic family dynamics a generation past that unknowingly shaped the present.

I found The Clearwater House at the Nebraska Writers Guild 2016 Spring Conference. I think it was one of two books I bought that day and I am glad I did. It is a paranormal story without being scary, or erotic, or over the top as many in the genre are nowadays (not that any of that is bad). The paranormal element made it mysterious and enthralling. It was almost a character in its own right.

I think this would be a great book, not only for paranormal fans, but also of mystery readers, women’s lit readers, and family drama fans. I’d recommend the readers be 18+ or at least mature 16 year olds and up. It’s not excessively graphic but there are definitely some adult situations that might not be appropriate for younger readers.

More by Tammy Marshall:

How I Healed My Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome Through Diet and Exercise: I’m Now Living Better with Chronic Illness

“Novel Thoughts” column in the Norfolk Daily News

Blog: Read, Ride, and Roam With Me!

Operation: Nebraska Author-The Marrying Type

What would you get if you took Anne Elliot from Jane Austen's Persuasion, dropped her into the 21st century and made her into a wedding planner?

You would get Elliot Lynch from Laura Chapman's The Marrying Type.

Persuasion is one of Austen's lesser-known novels and, I am ashamed to admit (due to my adoration of the author), aside from Pride and Prejudice the only Austen novel I've ever read (Unless you count Pride & Prejudice and Zombies in that case, I've read 3). The short, short summary of Persuasion (because I read it in high school and don't remember the minutia of the story) is that when Anne Elliot was young, she fell in love with a boy and they planned to get married. Her family talked her out of it because they felt he wasn't good enough for her. He joined the navy (?) and made something of himself. They ran into each other again years later, she was still unwed, I want to say he was a widower (?), and the sparks were still there.

Picture from Lost in British TV blog and the 1995 movie version of Persuasion.
You can just smell the attraction.

Persuasion stuck with me over the years because it is one of the only/the only novels that Austen wrote where the heroine is an older woman (and by older, I mean Anne was in her 30s, rather more relatable to me now than when I read it), instead of a 19-21 year old and it called attention to rash decisions people are apt to make when they are younger.

In The Marrying Type, we find Elliot Lynch, wedding planner extraordinaire in Charleston, SC who is trying to bring her family's wedding planning business back from the brink of bankruptcy, fighting her family to make the necessary changes to do just that, and planning the picture-perfect weddings her clients demand, all while being filmed for her cousin's reality TV show "The Marrying Type" that is following wedding planners from all over the US, showing what it's like behind the scenes.

The wedding that Elliot spends most of the book working on is for an adorable couple, Sadie and Adam, who recently moved back to Charleston and want to throw together a huge, society wedding in three months. Elliot sets out to do it on her own as her father and sister are working on landing a huge PR gig for a local society matriarch and her assistant is busy not assisting.

Oh, and the bride's brother is Elliot's ex-fiance.

Elliot and Eric met in college, fell in love, and got engaged. Then, when the app he designed took off, he dropped out of college, and headed for California. Elliot planned to go with him but felt that 19 years old was too young to get married and, with her mother's death less than a year earlier, she wanted to be close to her family.

The Marrying Type was a great modern take on Austen's Persuasion. The gradual re-kindling of Elliot and Eric's love amongst the drama of reality TV, Elliot's aggravating family, the threat of a buy-out, and a wonderful cast of relatable characters made it a great read. It was very well written, the characters had great development, not to mention the many laugh-out-loud moments; it was hard to put down.

I discovered The Marrying Type at the Nebraska Book Festival, a day-long event full of workshops with dozens of authors and publishers on hand to talk writing and sell books. In the few minutes I had to talk to the author, Laura Chapman, she was a warm, down-to-earth Nebraska gal who was more than willing to share her experiences and offer advice.

Other books by Laura Chapman:
Hardhats and Doormats
First & Goal
Going for Two
Three & Out
and many others

You can also follow Chapman on her blog Change the Word.

Operation: Nebraska Author- The Reluctant Canary Sings

It has been over two months since I last posted here and a lot has happened in that time. In addition to an overall lack of satisfaction with my life, my roommate/landlord had some big changes happen in his life that rippled to include changes in the living situations of everybody in the house. Instead of attempting to find somewhere to live locally that I could afford (Kearney is notoriously expensive for housing and not very pet friendly), I started looking for a new job elsewhere. I got one with a large company in Lincoln, NE, packed up my entire life, and moved halfway across the state. Today marks week 5 in my new apartment and I feel my creative juices finally flowing again, abet slowly. I'm sure they'll pick up with some work (fingers crossed).

I read The Reluctant Canary Sings by Faith A. Colburn probably two months ago and due to everything above and not enough time in the day, I wasn't able to sit down to write a review until now. And I had to reread it a second time to give it justice with this review... and because it's great.

Warning: I personally know Faith. We met about two years ago when I joined the Central Nebraska Writers Group and we've grown into pretty good friends. I'm going to try to keep this review as unbiased as possible. Let's see how I do. 😁

The Reluctant Canary Sings follows Bobbie Bowen, a 15 year old girl growing up in Cleveland, OH in 1937. Bobbie had been blessed with the voice of an angel and cursed with a father with a gambling problem.

Would you just look at this beautiful cover?!

The book starts with a brief overview of what the city of Cleveland was like during the '30s. There was a serial killer called the Butcher of Kingsbury Run who not only was real, he was a significant factor in many things that happened in the book. The country was in the middle of "the second dip of a double-dip depression" and majority of the country's men, women, and children worried about where their next meal was coming from and if they were lucky enough to have a roof over their head, how long they'd be able to keep it.

It is here we meet Bobbie, enjoying what free or cheap entertainment she could with her friends in the summer, working at a popcorn stand and swimming in Lake Erie, dreaming of becoming an artist and only singing for herself. Her mom cleaned banks at night and pounded the pavement during the day looking for more work while her dad applied for any and all WPA jobs he could and tried to earn a little extra money betting the odds on the ponies.

When Bobbie's friends convinced her to enter a singing contest (the grand prize was $100 and a job for the summer) at the Pavilion , a local dance hall, she had never sang for anybody but herself but the lure of a steady income, even if it was just for the summer, was too good to pass up. Winning the contest set her on the path to becoming a canary (a band's singer) at a number of different clubs and eventually out on the road with a band that traveled up and down the eastern seaboard.

Russ Peterson's Big Band performing Blue Moon.

Blue Moon was Bobbie's theme song.

She was on the road when Pearl Harbor was attacked and as fear and the threat of war swept the country, jobs for bands and singers dwindled down to next to nothing. The band broke up with singles or pairs taking any and all jobs they could until the draft notices came in. Bobbie took a solo job in Buffalo, NY, spending almost all her cash on a bus ticket to get there and a room for the week just to find that the club that hired her was foreclosed. She called home to have her dad wire her enough money from her savings to pay for a bus ticket home and a few meals on the way only to find out he had lost her entire savings, almost $2000, at the tracks. Desperate for a job to earn enough for a bus ticket home, Bobbie went from club to club, nearing starvation with each passing day. After being turned down time and again and being attacked by one bastard club owner, Bobbie was reaching the end of her hope and her strength when she finally got a job at a club that paid just enough to get her home to Cleveland.

It was Buffalo that was the turning of the tide for Bobbie. She was tired of being force to rely on unreliable income, tired of wondering where her next meal was coming from, and tired of being groped, pinched, leered at, and taken advantage of.

It was 1942, America was at war and Bobbie joined the Woman's Army Auxiliary Corps.

I was constantly forgetting that for the majority of the book, Bobbie was only fifteen. Even from the beginning, she showed great sense and maturity that only grew with life's harsh lessons. She went from being a school girl to the family's major breadwinner in just a few short weeks and she surprisingly harbored very little resentment toward her parents for it, aside from the anger she had toward her dad for losing her savings. She faced a loss that almost broke her, and while she will probably feel the loss for the rest of her life, she eventually got up and faced the day.

I think some people would try to label The Reluctant Canary Sings as a Young Adult/coming-of-age story but I don't agree with that. Yes, Bobbie is only fifteen and grows up during the course of the book, but even at the beginning she is far more mature than many adults are today, just because of the hard time she grew up in and while I think some older YA readers would be okay reading it, The Reluctant Canary Sings is for adults.

Now for my opinion of The Reluctant Canary Sings. Simply put, I loved it.

Faith is an avid historian and researcher (check out her multiple non-fiction books) but she does something that many scholars can't do, she created a rich story with rounded characters that continue to grow throughout the book. She gives the reader an entertaining story that also touches the soul. Her dedication to historical accuracy and detail only give the story more depth and perspective instead of drying it out.

I wholeheartedly recommend The Reluctant Canary Sings to anybody who likes historical fiction (Depression/WWII era specifically), stories with strong female characters, Big Band music, and stories of people overcoming the odds time and time again.

Hopefully, I managed to make that as unbiased as possible, and if it doesn't seem like it, I won't apologize. I loved the book and I admire the woman who wrote it.

Meet part of my writer's group (left to right): Wayne Anson, Jennifer Hansch,
Me, Mari Beck, and Bruce Schindler.
Front (left to right) Brook Brouillette and Faith Colburn.
I stole this picture from the Central Nebraska Writers Group Facebook page.
Mari, I hope you don't mind!

Other books by Faith Colburn:
Prairie Landscapes
Threshold: A Memior
Virtue and Faith
From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Lincoln
Driving: A Short Story
Storm Watch

You can find out more about Faith on her website faithanncolburn.com and on her blog faithanncolburn.com/wordpress

Story Acceptance- Below the Stairs: Tales from the Cellar

http://www.ozhorrorcon.com/below-the-stairs

Better late than never, I am excited to announce that my short story "The Vaults" was chosen to be included in OzHorror.com's anthology, Below the Stairs: Tales from the Cellar, edited by Steve Dillon. Below the Stairs is the second in the themed anthology series, Things from the Well. Authors in this anthology include Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Allan Gunnells, H.P. Lovecraft, and many more.


Here is a short excerpt from "The Vaults":

"You should probably leave."I struggled to swallow as I nodded. I turned for the door and heard rubber gloves snapping against skin. It was all the urging I needed. I flew down the hall, up the stairs to the sidewalk. I blinked against the bright light and gulped fresh air, trying to control my stomach. I knew my uncle was into some weird shit, but I had no idea how weird.The room looked like it had been baptized in blood.

Below the Stairs: Tales from the Cellar was released October, 2017 and is available on amazon.com. You can also find the first in the Things from the Well anthology series Between the Tracks: Tales from the Ghost Train on amazon.com.

Operation: Nebraska Author- The Meaning of Names

I must apologize for being remiss in my blogging duties. A severe lack of writing motivation added to some serious life upheavals have left me with little time and little inclination to write anything more than writing prompts for my writers group. I finished the book for my next review more than a month ago and I have been staring at it sitting on my end table since.

I'm glad I found my motivation again because this next book is a must-read.

The Meaning of Names by Karen Gettert Shoemaker was the 2016 One Book One Nebraska Winner.

One Book One Nebraska is a book chosen every year by the Nebraska Center for the book.

"The Nebraska Center for the Book believes One Book One Nebraska demonstrates how books and reading connect people across time and place. Each year, Nebraska communities come together through literature in community-wide reading programs to explore a classic work by one of Nebraska’s best-loved authors, or a book with a Nebraska setting." (http://centerforthebook.nebraska.gov/programs/onebook.html)

My friend, Jen, and I went to see Karen Shoemaker speak at the Kearney Public Library during her One Book One Nebraska tour. she was very interesting to listen to, not only because of her passion about the subject matter, but also because of her personal connection to the story.

The Meaning of Names follows Gerda Vogel, the daughter of German immigrants  who settled in West Point, NE at the end of the 19th Century. Gerda incurred the wrath of her father and sorrow of her mother when she fell in love with Fritz Vogel (a German immigrant), married without their consent, and headed west. The young couple settled down on a farm outside of Stuart, NE.

Those of you who have experienced a thunderstorm on the
Great Plains are familiar with the cover picture. It is also
a great visual of what the characters weather in the book.

The story starts just after the USA joined the Great War. Anti-German sentiment was slowly growing across the country and the heart of the Great Plains was not immune.

Gerda was aware of the growing hatred of her people, but her first glimpse of the violence that it could cause occurred on the train on her way to visit her family in West Point. A group of young men, full of liquid courage, accosted a German man, beat him, and threw him off the train into the snow. Gerda was fearful for the man but terrified for herself and her three young sons who were with her.

The crowd in the car cheered.

Anti-German sentiment grew as the war continued. Violence against German immigrants was more and more common, neighbor turned against neighbor, and German descendants became more isolated as their language was shunned and German-language books were burned.

The fear grew as the first of Stuart's sons were killed in the war and more men were called up in an expanded draft.

Fritz, Gerda's husband, was old enough and valuable enough as a farmer to have been exempt to the first drafts, but as things in Europe got worse, he went back into the pool of eligible men. A moment of kindness to a man who lost a son in the war who had power on the draft board ensured Fritz's number was called.

Nebraska.

The seasons passed as the Vogel family survived the storm of hatred and work to keep their farm running smoothly. Fritz hid his draft results from Gerda but did all he could to prepare his family and farm for his absence.

Amidst this all, a silent evil crept its way north, taking thousands, sparing few.

Stuart was not immune to the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed millions around the globe. The Vogel family was some of the lucky ones who fell to the deadly disease but managed to come out the other side. Even bringing a true miracle to their family in the process.

Gerda was pregnant when she fell ill but managed to give birth to a healthy baby who was raised by a family in Stuart until the Vogels were well again.

That baby was Shoemaker's mother.

Shoemaker did a wonderful job bringing the beauty and vastness of the Plains alive with her writing. Her words brought Nebraska alive.

Her characters: Gerda, Fritz, Dr. Gannoway, Alloys and Magaret Baum, and all the others came alive on the page and are so like the Nebraskans that I grew up knowing.

This book came along at the perfect time. When there is so much anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern, and anti-outsider sentiment in the world, it is disheartening to see history repeat itself. Shoemaker did a fantastic job of putting the reader into the Vogel's shoes, to show them what the Germans were going through during WWI (and what they would see again during WWII) and what people are going through today.

The Meaning of Names is a great study into, not only rural life in Nebraska during the nineteen teens, but also of human nature. I strongly recommend reading it.

Other Books by Karen Gettert Shoemaker
Night Sounds and Other Stories
Shoemaker also reviews books

Operation: Nebraska Author- Steam on the Horizon

Do you know what steampunk is?

Until about 4 years ago, I had never even heard of steampunk. The problem is, I actually loved it. How does that work exactly? I knew I loved corsets and goggles, gears and airships, spyglasses and fingerless gloves, really anything that spoke of the Victorian era but not one in the history books, a Victorian era of fantasy.

I just didn't know that there was a whole movement of people like me who liked it.

Picture from The Ministry of Particular Occurrences.
Not the most Steampunk-y picture on the internet...
but Nathan Fillion.

Then my bestie and I went to the very first British Fest in Omaha, NE where we attended a panel put on by Melissa Ann Conroy, steampunk author.

I finally had a name for it.

Steampunk is past meets future in a cloud of steam. If the clock had stopped spinning sometime between 1837 and 1901 but steam-powered technology leaped forward to unknown bounds. (Think of the movie Wild Wild West and you'll have an idea of what steampunk is. Not a very good idea because it was a terrible movie, but an idea.)

Picture from Geek Serious
Kato, Queen of Steampunk and
one of the pioneers of Steampunk Couture.

Steam on the Horizon by Melissa Ann Conroy is the first book I have ever read that was steampunk. It follows Captain Gavin Roberts and his crew of the airship the Horizon as they work to repair the ship after a boiler explosion, unwanted notoriety of being the fastest airship in England- possibly the world- and hunting for jobs to keep food in their bellies and the ship in the air all while trying to avoid the attention of Sir Smothers, the businessman who controlled the majority of all shipping-marine and air- in the world.

For some reason steampunk just goes with hookah.
Opium would have been a better fit but there is a distinct
lack of Victorian-era opium dens in millennial Nebraska.

Why would Smothers care about one single airship?

He used to own her when she was the Lucky Lady... and that boiler explosion killed his son who was the captain of her at the time.

There is no love lost between Roberts and Smothers and their relationship worsens when Roberts' friend from childhood turned mad inventor puts a whole new boiler and engine in the Horizon, making her the fastest and most fuel efficient airship in operation.

This being my first foray into steampunk, I was a little afraid that Steam on the Horizon would be all gears and goggles but little substance. I was very happy to be wrong. Roberts is a good captain. He cares for his crew, loves his ship, and tries to keep everything in the air, but he's not afraid to fight when necessary to defend what is his. The crew of the Horizon are all wonderfully written characters from the stoic first mate Oboe who would follow Roberts to the end of the earth to green-and-eager-to-please Bloomberg, the slightly mad Barking Jack, and the unwilling crew member: inventor and cocaine addicted Halloway.

Conroy has a great understanding of airships and is the master of the universe she has created for the Aether Saga. I can't wait to read more. The second in the series, Clouds of War is currently living on my bookshelf, begging to be read, but it will have to wait a bit until I get some others read. No word on more books in the series yet, but hopefully soon.

Operation: Nebraska Author- Sky Rider, the Story of Evelyn Sharp, WWII WASP

Every summer, the Trails & Rails Museum (the museum I volunteer at) has a big festival called Wagons West where they celebrate Buffalo County history, westward expansion, and local trailblazers that came before us.

A few years ago, the director had everybody pick a person from Buffalo County's history to "be" at the festival as part of the children's scavenger hunt. The kids had to find the people wearing wristbands, asked who they were, and learn about that person's life. Every year since, I have been Evelyn Sharp, aviatrix and local heroine, which made my next book for Operation: Nebraska Author so important to me.

Last October, while attending the Nebraska Writers Guild Fall Conference, I happened to notice a book on an authors table that had a picture of a woman pilot on it. When I read the title, Sky Rider: The Story of Evelyn Sharp, World War II WASP by Dr. Jean A. Lukesh, I knew it was going home with me. Unfortunately, I had to wait a few hours because Dr. Lukesh was not at her table at the time. In fact, I pounced on her as soon as the conference was over while she was packing up her table and ended up taking up about fifteen minutes of her time. In the course of our conversation, I found out that she was a historian and had written a number of books on notable Nebraskans and Nebraska Adventure, the textbook that all Nebraska fourth graders use while learning about our state.

Back to the book.

Sky Rider is about Evelyn Sharp, one of the first, youngest, and most experienced female pilots that our country has seen. She was born in Wyoming and after moving around a lot when she was young, her family settled just up the road from me in Ord, NE. It was here where she decided she was going to "drive an airplane."

A stroke of luck when Evelyn was fifteen had a flight instructor offering to give her flying lessons in exchange for a room at her parents boarding house. Evelyn's drive from that moment on was toward one goal: to spend her life flying. With quite a bit of turbulence to get through, Evelyn went on to own a succession of planes, gather a number of different licenses (instrument and commercial being just two of many), and eventually join the 99s, a national organization for female pilots (she was the youngest in Nebraska). From there, she became a flight instructor for the Civilian Pilot Training Program (she was the youngest instructor in the country), even training men who would go on to be pilots in the military.

With WWII looming on the horizon, Jacqueline Cochran called upon other members of the 99s to join her to create a group of women pilots with the job of ferrying military planes all over the US and Canada just like they were already doing in England. While Cochran's group did not get military approval, Evelyn was later asked to join a similar group that was organized by Nancy Harkness Love, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). At just shy of 22 years old, Evelyn became one of the "Originals," the first 25 women who passed the training and requirements to join the WAFS.

Evelyn worked hard to prove that women pilots could do everything the male pilots could do. She qualified to fly large transport planes like the C-47, bombers like the B-25 Mitchell, and attack planes like the A-20 Havoc. She was even one of the first women to become certified to fly pursuit planes like the P-51 Mustang and the P-38 Lightning.

The WAFS were so successful at proving their skills that the military decided to bring them into the fold. The WAFS were combined with Jacqueline Cochran's group and renamed the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs).

Evelyn would go on to become the WASP in command at the base in Palm Springs, CA for a short time before it was turned into a pursuit base and she was transferred back to Long Beach. She began training to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress so she could pass the Fifth Rating which was the highest rating a female pilot could get.

Before she could complete her training, she was given the order to fly a P-38 from Long Beach to a base in New Jersey. The trip would take five days. While most of it was smooth sailing, she ran into some bad weather on the second to the last day of her trip and had to put down. The last day of her trip started well, the plane was in good working order and the weather was clear. She took off just before 10:30 in the morning. Shortly after take-off, one of the engines stopped. She did not have enough altitude to use her parachute so Evelyn did all she could to put the plane down safely, but it was not enough. When she landed in a field near the airport, the landing gear punched through the bottom of the plane, knocking her seat loose and up through the canopy. Evelyn was killed on impact of a broken neck.

She was 24 years old.

Even to this day, Evelyn Sharp is a favorite daughter of Ord and of Nebraska. Just a few years after her death, Ord renamed their airfield to the Evelyn Sharp Field and there is a monument there dedicated to her that features two propellers, one from her first plane and one from a P-38. Her name also appears twice in the Nebraska Aviation Hall of Fame, first on her own, and second included in the 19 names of WASP pilots from Nebraska.

While Sky Rider was written for kids ages 11-12, I enjoyed learning about Evelyn Sharp and all of the amazing things she was able to accomplish in her short life. I definitely recommend it for really anybody wanting to learn more about Evelyn herself, the evolution of the WAFS and the WASPs, and the history of women in aviation.

Dr. Jean A. Lukesh has done nearly every job you can think of in the book industry from librarian, media specialist, teacher, writer, editor, and publisher. She has won many awards for her writing including the Nebraska Library Association 2010 Mari Sandoz Award.

Other Books by Dr. Jean A. Lukesh:
Lucky Ears: the Real Story of Ben Kuroki, World War II Hero
Wolves in Blue: Stories of the North Brothers and their Pawnee Scouts
Secret Brother: the Story of Solon Borglum "Sculptor of the Prairie"
My Name is Shawnee: A Horse Story with Photographs
and many more