World of Adventure 11 – Skydive!

Gary Paulsen's Skydive is a fast, gripping adventure for 10 year olds about a boy who's desperate to jump out of a plane.

What happens

Jesse is thirteen and spends nearly every day at Buck's little airfield near Seattle. He sweeps up, packs parachutes and knows more about jumping than most of the grown-up students. The only thing he can't do is actually jump. The rules say you have to be sixteen.

Then Robin turns up. Her rich dad has signed her up for lessons she very clearly doesn't want (she's terrified of heights). What she does love is her camera. So on her first day she snaps a plane landing on the runway, and the passengers climbing out of it.

That's when things get strange. A pilot called Pete gets very cross about the camera. Then Robin's locker is broken into and the film is gone.

Jesse and Robin make a great pair. He's the one who knows about planes and she's the one who notices things. They squabble a bit, they tease each other, and they end up working it out together like proper detectives.

The chapters are short and lots of them end on a cliffhanger. It's very hard to stop at bedtime! There's also loads of real skydiving detail, from how you leave the plane to what the altimeter on your sleeve is for.

It's worth knowing that this gets quite tense. The people Robin photographed turn out to be part of a drug gang. A parachute is tampered with on purpose, and a grown-up punches and slaps Jesse. Jesse and Robin are also a good few years older than the readers it's shelved for, although the writing itself is short and simple.

If your reader worries about people being hurt, or about falling, this might be one to read together first. If they love a proper thrill and a clever kid getting one over on the villains, they'll race through it.

What to read next

For another World of Adventure story where ordinary kids have to outwit dangerous men, try Paulsen's Captive. A whole class is marched out of school at gunpoint, and one quiet boy at the back has to keep his head.