Beyond Amelia

It is 1940, and 20-year-old Ginny Ross from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, has earned an engineering degree and become a certified pilot at Purdue University. When Beyond Amelia opens, her three best friends, which includes her boyfriend, Matt, have all left to join the war effort. Ginny longs to participate as well, especially given her exceptional flying skills. When she hears about a new service created to fly bomber aircraft from Canada to the UK, she concocts an elaborate plan to pass as a boy and join up as a pilot. She passes the rigorous testing exercises and is taken on as a copilot, flying several missions. Most of the action actually occurs within the male camaraderie of the ferry service where there is evidently a lot of downtime. Stemp manages to make this downtime not too boring and not feel too frustrating for the pilots either. But under the surface, there is a sense of the necessity to fill time spent waiting at the airbase as well as during the long return voyage by sea after any delivery of aircraft. Because Ginny's presence allows a look at male spaces and male bonding from the perspective of both an outsider and an insider, it feels authentic, though the moderate drinking is probably a tame version of wartime antics.

Danger comes from many sources. One is the physical danger of crashing or being shot down. There was a war on, and their aircraft are new, with many technical flaws. Trouble on one mission means a hasty parachute escape over Ireland where Ginny breaks her elbow. The more personal, emotional danger is the possibility of being discovered as a girl. To heighten this tension, Ginny is harassed by another member of the ferry service. Wright is jealous that he didn’t qualify as a pilot, becoming a radio man instead. He’s always watching Ginny, and she knows she has to be vigilant. He takes every opportunity to follow her, search her room and eventually assaults her. This lurking threat takes over the momentum at times when focusing on other events would have been interesting. The danger is alleviated when Wright dies, due to his own cowardice, and Ginny comes to terms with mourning his loss, despite his bad character. Ginny also has several health scares which necessitate revealing her identity to a doctor and other helpers. Everyone who discovers her secret is unwaveringly supportive.

While dealing with Wright’s menacing behaviour, it slowly dawns on Ginny how dangerous her mission is. The story suggests that men are often ignorant, at best, and dangerous at worst. Even the rest of her comrades will feel angry if they know they have been equaled or bested by a woman. Ginny harkens back to her friend Mabel’s telling her she is naïve and realizes that it’s true. She plans to accept one last mission and then make new plans after that. Luckily, she meets Jackie Cochran, an American female pilot and friend of Amelia Earhart, who actually recognizes her from Amelia’s stories. She plans to convince the military to use women in supporting roles, as they have started to in the UK, and offers Ginny a way to help in the future.

Beyond Amelia is a classic dramatic cross-dressing tale, as in Shakespeare plays, a girl disguised as a boy for opportunity. Most current books about passing as another gender are dealing with questions of gender identity, but, in this case, Ginny is just trying to assist the war effort, and nothing else. She does not even long for adventure like many cross-dressing heroines of the past. She doesn’t see war as heroic or romantic, but she simply loves being a pilot and wants to put her skills to good use. The writing can be a little dry, but this is balanced by the fascinating historical material about the real life Ferry Command. Though Ginny is obviously an exception as a female pilot so determined that she will change her identity, Beyond Amelia does feel like a realistic portrayal of life at the time.

The book can stand alone. Although I had not read the first two books, I was intrigued to read more about Ginny’s challenges to become a pilot in the first place and her relationship with Amelia Earhart. Amelia has already disappeared by the time this third installment of the series begins and appears only in occasional flashbacks or as a general inspiration. Stemp has elected to continue her series, which began a decade earlier when Ginny was a young teen. Young readers will probably continue to follow Ginny’s journey even though she is no longer a teenager and is experiencing the world as an independent adult.