Soaring with Amilia

1951. Eleven-year-old Hannah Heywood is fascinated with missing persons. Take For instance, Amelia Earhart, the amazing pilot who disappeared in 1937 in an attempt to fly around the world. The whole United States Navy couldn’t find her. And then there’s her dad who went missing during the war, and since then, Mama has slipped away into her own world and hardly knows Hannah exists.

Hannah’s stunned when she discovers her Uncle Andrew, who flew P-40 fighters in the Pacific theatre and won two silver stars, had a girlfriend when he was in Occupied Japan. Weren’t the Japanese the enemy? And still, he can’t get over the heartbreak he felt when Yosana refused to come to America with him. Then when her uncle learns that his beloved has died of leukemia resulting from radiation poisoning after the atomic bomb, he freaks out. Now she’s a missing person too, maybe in a grave or an urn and is lost forever to Uncle Andrew. He not only cries; he starts acting in weird ways that upset everybody, right when he’s starting his first pastoral charge in the Presbyterian church. What’s going on? Overwhelmed, Hannah fantasizes flying away into the wild blue yonder with her imaginary friend, Amelia Earhart.

When the family moves to their new home in Spyder Hill, Texas, life becomes even crazier. Hannah contrives to enroll in a regular school for the very first time, where she hears about the most interesting missing person of all—Betty Jean Nealson, a girl her age who vanished from the Texas town the year before. Everybody’s in an uproar thinking that German immigrant Dr. Gunther Van Heusen is the villain. Hannah decides to take on the case oblivious that B.J.'s killer already has her in his sites. As she moves nearer and nearer to finding the truth about the girl's disappearance, he is watching her closely.

HANNAH holds secret conversations with her imaginary mentor, Amelia, to find her way through her confusing life.