The Girl with Her Head in the Clouds

Karen McCombie's The Girl with Her Head in the Clouds is a daring adventure for 10 year olds based on the real Dolly Shepherd, who jumped out of balloons for a living.

What happens

Dolly has always wanted to fly. The book opens with her on the roof of the shed, in her best dress, holding an umbrella upside down. (Her very proper Aunt Mariam is NOT impressed.)

Aunt Mariam runs an ostrich feather business in London and wants Dolly working for her at sixteen. Girls don't go clambering on roofs, she says. Dolly's answer? Boys do.

Then one Saturday at Alexandra Palace (everyone calls it Ally Pally), Dolly blags a waitressing job to hear a famous band for free. She ends up volunteering for a cowboy's shooting act instead. A blindfolded marksman, an egg on her head and a lady in the front row fainting clean away!

Soon a balloon pilot called Captain Gaudron asks her to join his display team. Which leaves Dolly with a promise to her aunt that she's really not sure she can keep.

Dolly tells it herself and she's brilliant company. She's cheeky and fearless and she can't help asking why girls shouldn't do the exciting things too. The suffragettes even smash the window of her aunt's shop.

The moments up in the sky are gorgeous. Fields turn into patchwork and Dolly dances her feet on the air. At one point she drifts right up above the clouds, singing every song she knows to stop herself panicking.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Things do go wrong up there. Dolly gets stuck in the sky, dumped on a factory roof and tangled in a barbed-wire fence, and she hides a newspaper about another parachutist who died. One landing goes very badly indeed.

If your reader worries about heights or accidents, parts of it may feel tense. But Dolly's courage is the heart of the book, and the last chapter tells you what the real Dolly did next.

What to read next

If they'd like another spirited girl in old London from the same author, try Fagin's Girl. Ettie makes fabric flowers for rich ladies' bonnets with her mother, until her brother Joe starts keeping secrets.