By Steve Breen
An eight-year-old girl builds real flying machines out of junkyard scrap in her parents' salvage yard, and she is the engineer, not the passenger.
Violet Van Winkle has been building things since she was a baby, and by eight she is turning her parents' junkyard into aircraft: the Wing-a-ma-jig, the Bugmobile, the Snickerdoodle, each drawn with its rivets and struts and salvaged parts on show. The other children at school think she's odd and say so. She sets off to win the big air show, and on the way she spots a troop of Boy Scouts in a raft heading for real trouble on the river. She goes after them instead, and it costs her the plane and the trophy.
This is the one where the plane-obsessed child gets to be the one who builds it. Violet isn't dreaming about flying - she's welding, sketching, and testing, and the pictures take her engineering seriously enough that your child can trace it. She's also the only girl on this shelf, in a corner of the library that's overwhelmingly boys and men, and she's there as the mechanic. Worth knowing that's what your child will see.