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BookBrowse Reviews My Dad's A Birdman: A bittersweet and nimbly-illustrated tale for ages 9+

My Dad's A Birdman
by David Almond, Polly Dunbar
Paperback, Mar 2011,
128 pages.
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This bittersweet and nimbly-illustrated tale of a wise girl whose bird-brained father attempts to rise above earthly sorrow will lift the spirits of readers young and old.

Bird-men interest David Almond. His celebrated and award-winning debut novel, Skellig, concerns a boy's discovery of a winged man-creature languishing in the derelict garage of his new house. The boy and a bird-loving neighbor befriend, protect and fortify the birdman with ale and Chinese food while the boy's infant sister hovers near death in the hospital.

In this, Almond's first book for young readers, grief weighs so heavily on Lizzie's widowed father that she has assumed the role of caretaker. Lizzie discovers the only thing that engages and enlivens her father is an upcoming human flight competition. A disheveled Daedalus imprisoned in a maze of sorrow, he's...
Beyond the Book
Aeronautical engineer and inventor Paul MacCready (1925-2007) earned the title "birdman" becoming internationally known in 1977 as the "father of human-powered flight" when his Gossamer Condor made the first sustained, controlled flight by a heavier-than-air craft powered solely by its pilot's muscles. For the feat he received the $95,000 Henry Kremer Prize; and the Condor is now housed at the Smithsonian.

Two years later, his team created the Gossamer Albatross, another 70-pound craft with a 96-foot wingspan that, with DuPont sponsorship, achieved a human-powered flight across the English Channel. That flight, made by "pilot-engine" Bryan Allen, took almost three hours. It won the new Kremer prize of $213,000, at the time the largest cash prize in...
This review was originally published in May 2008, and has been updated for the March 2011 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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