FREE: The Wondrous Whirligig: The Wright Brothers' First Flying Machine

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Grade 2-3-A good idea gone awry. With so much documented information about the Wright brothers available, it is odd that Glass would choose to posit his story as a type of tall tale told with hyperbole; fictionalized dialogue; and capricious, almost caricatured, illustrations. Although the Wrights could poke fun at themselves and even be the brunt of others' jokes, they do not need to be made fun of: "Yessireebob-. we'll just fit this ramp over that old teeter-totter and bounce your wondrous whatchamacallit right into the sky," say older siblings Loren and Reuch. In reality, Orville and Wilbur's brothers were proud of the younger boys' accomplishments, as was the whole family. The language credited to them is misleading. Their father, Milton Wright, was a bishop in the United Brethren Church, and, although it might not have been a major sect at the time, he was more than a "traveling preacher." Their mother (Glass gets this right in his author's note) encouraged their projects and was quite inventive in her own right. Glass drops the ball, or the thingamajig, or the contraption, or the "whirligig," in this attempt at a lighthearted account. He tries to relate the inventors' childhood attempts to construct a flying machine inspired by their father's gift of a French flying toy, a h‚licoptŠre, a "bat." Instead, he takes more than a few liberties and compromises the intelligence of the Wrights and of readers.
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