Flying Girl Books in Order

The Flying Girl books are early aviation adventures written for young readers at a moment when flight still felt like a brand-new kind of daring. Baum wrote them under the pen name Edith Van Dyne, and they read like a mix of “girls’ series” friendship and hands-on, mechanical problem-solving. Instead of castles or boarding-school drama, the recurring backdrop is hangars, airfields, and the traveling circus energy of exhibition flying.

The heroine is Orissa Kane, a teenager who wants to fly and is willing to work for it. She’s surrounded by people who treat aviation as a serious craft rather than a fantasy—pilots, builders, and promoters trying to make air meets and exhibitions succeed. Orissa isn’t just a passenger in the cockpit. She studies, practices, and insists on understanding how the machines work, right down to the practical details that can keep a risky hobby from turning deadly.

Her immediate circle matters, too. Orissa’s brother Stephen is part of the aviation world, and the books treat flying as something you do with a team: someone builds, someone tests, someone handles the ground work, and everyone watches for trouble. Orissa’s closest ally is her friend Sybil Cumberford, and their friendship gives the story a warm core even when the action turns tense.

The first book leans into the excitement of air shows, competitions, and the social whirl that builds up around them. Orissa’s confidence puts her in the middle of rivalries, accidents, and moments where quick decisions matter. There’s a steady undercurrent of “prove it”: prove you can handle a machine, prove you can keep your head when the crowd is screaming, prove you belong in a field most people still treat as a men-only club.

Orissa wants the sky, not permission slips.

Then the sequel widens the scope. In The Flying Girl and Her Chum, the thrills of flight spill into a survival-style adventure, pushing the girls into unfamiliar territory where they have to rely on ingenuity instead of crowds and applause. The aviation element is still there, but the stakes become more immediate: safety, trust, and getting back home when help isn’t close by.

Read together, the two books make a neat pairing: one about entering the world of aviation, the other about what happens when a high-flying hobby turns into a real test. If you like stories where the heroine’s “special power” is simply that she’s prepared, the Flying Girl books are a fun snapshot of an era—and a reminder that Baum could write excitement without relying on fantasy at all.