Flight of the Tiger Moth.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Canada’s “homefront” is the centre stage for this fast-paced novel set in Saskatchewan during the Second World War. The main character is Jack Waters, a 16-year-old small-town teen who dreams of becoming a fighter pilot to fight the Nazi menace overseas. He is held back by two things: he is still too young to enlist and his eyesight is not good enough for pilot standards. Undeterred, Jack had been secretly taking flying lessons from Sandy, a young British Commonwealth Air Training Program flight instructor.

Sandy, who is engaged to Jack’s half-sister, Flo is sent overseas to fight in the war. When a telegram arrives informing them that Sandy is missing in action, Flo enlists herself despite their mother’s protests. Jack’s refuge is the local Commonwealth air base, where he has a part-time job cleaning and servicing airplanes and befriending the British pilot trainees who are barely older than Jack himself. When a Tiger Moth trainer plane crashes and badly injures one of Jack’s pilot-trainee friends, Jack has to reach deep within himself to discover whether he is finally ready to shed his childhood and become part of the adult world, where actions have life and death consequences.

Author Mary Woodbury weaves multiple coming-of-age themes in this fast paced novel about the Second World War. Although isolated far from Europe, world events force Jack, Flo, the British pilot trainees and even Jack’s mother to move onward from their sheltered existing lives. This fine novel explores Canada’s role in training more than 130,000 aircrew for the British Commonwealth war effort and acknowledges the efforts of 50,000 Canadian women in the military during the Second World War. Flight of the Tiger Moth belongs on every school library shelf in Canada. Highly recommended.