Courageous Wings - a New Prize Guild Library mystery

This book is the second of two flying stories that Mildred Wirt (Benson) wrote under The New Prize Guild Library banner of books.  The first was The Sky Racers (you can read my review here: The Sky Racers), indicated as book 10 of the collection on the back of the dust jacket for this book, while this book is listed as book 13 of the collection.  There are quite a number of classic books on this list, including some by Louisa May Alcott, Robert Luis Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, and others.  Thus, Wirt must have felt some level of honor to have her books placed in the same category as such great writers.  It's just a shame these two books about young aviators were not on par with those other stories.

Courageous Wings is very similar in subject matter and plot to The Sky Racers, a fact I did not realize until I went back and looked at my review of that first book (which was nearly four years ago).  Both books deal with a young girl who is learning how to fly.  Both stories center around a competitor who is trying to sabotage the new invention of the girl's father.  Both books also feature a plane crash in the mountains.  The main differences are in the actual protagonists (in the first book, Jane Grant is eager to fly her father's plane, while in this story, Cleo Bowman, wants to fly, but at the last moment, becomes fearful until she is put in a position where she must fly a plane in order to save her father's life!) and the details surrounding the flights (Jane's father has entered a race, while Cleo's father is trying to rebuild a failed business by doing stunt flying with traveling circuses).

Oddly enough, the book opens not with the main character, but rather with Jim Sherman and Shorty Dawes, an airplane pilot and his mechanic.  While they do play a large part in the story as the supporting cast to Cleo and her father, Martin Bowman, they are just that - supporting characters.  So, I found it strange Wirt would begin the story with these two men, telling the story from Sherman's point of view.  Even when Cleo does make her appearance (p. 8) in the first chapter, the POV remains with Sherman through the first and second chapters. It it not until the third chapter, when Sherman, Dawes, and Cleo come face-to-face with Marcus Reman, a man claiming to be a friend of her father (but who turns out to be a thief who tries to break into the Bowmans' home safe) that the point-of-view begins to change to Cleo, and she takes more prominence in the story.

As with Jane Grant in The Sky Racers, Cleo Bowman in this book is not a very interesting character.  She is nowhere near as determined as Jane from the first book, and her indecisiveness regarding whether she will dare to fly a plane on her own quickly becomes tiresome.  Her doubt and constant questioning of herself is not something most people want to read in a story - they want their protagonists to be strong-willed, determined, and daring.  Perhaps Wirt was simply playing Cleo in this manner, so that when she does take to the sky, in a plane with which she is completely unfamiliar to boot!, her ability to overcome her own fears is meant to be all that more impactful.  Unfortunately, for me, it did not have any impact at all; rather, it was sort of like reaching a point of "Finally!"  

I will give Wirt some credit for creativity, however, as Cleo ultimately unravels the mystery of what really happened between her father and his former business partner that caused the split between them and pitted them as bitter rivals against one another.  This reveal does not provide a bit of a twist, as the person you think is truly behind everything turns out to be just another victim of a criminal determined to get revenge on a perceived slight years prior.  

One interesting thing I must point out is the use of Ardmore City in this book.  Ardmore City is where Jim Sherman and Shorty Dawes run a private airplane company, and it is where Cleo first meets the aviator and his mechanic.  I raise this point because Wirt also used "Ardmore" as the name of the college that Ruth Fielding attended in her series, and it was also the name of the college the girls in Ghost Gables were attending.  Makes one wonder what importance "Ardmore" had to Wirt, that she would use it again and again in various books.

Overall, it's not one of Wirt's better books.  Despite her later love of flying, it seems to me that Wirt's early books that dealt with aviation just did not have the same quality of stories and characters that her mystery stories did, as neither The Sky Racers nor Courageous Wings were good reads in my opinion.  Having never read the Ruth Darrow series, which I know is one of Wirt's earliest series, I cannot comment on those.

RATING:  4 long-endurance engines out of 10 for giving us an Oriental servant (Lee Sin) that, while definitely a stereotype, offered some humorous (and in some instances ingenious!) moments in the story.