Older Kids’ Lit 1966 (5)

By: Joshua Glenn
January 14, 2016

One in a series of 10 posts surfacing Josh Glenn’s favorite 1966 adventures for intermediate readers. Happy 50th anniversary!

K.M. Peyton’s sailing adventure Thunder in the Sky.

Before K.M. Peyton became famous for innumerable books about girls and ponies, not to mention her romantic Flambards series, she wrote several YA adventures which — like this one — revolve around sailing. So if, like me, you’re a fan of sailing adventures like The Riddle of the Sands, the Swallows and Amazons series, or the Horatio Hornblower books, then check out Peyton’s Windfall (1962), The Maplin Bird (1964), and The Plan for Birdsmarsh (1965). In Thunder in the Sky, which is set during WWI, 16-year-old Sam works on his family’s sailing barge. He is disappointed that his older brother, Gil, doesn’t see it as his patriotic duty to enlist in the fighting; in fact, he begins to suspect that Gil might be an enemy spy. Will a supply run to France — carrying flammable cargo past bomb-dropping dirigibles — end in disaster? Some readers may complain about the exacting detail into which Peyton goes about how barges are sailed. But not this reader! Fun fact: Recommended by the British Library Association as one of the outstanding books for young readers published that year.

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Older Kids’ Lit 1966 (5)

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