Silk Rhode Award Winner - 2022

This first installment of the Talon series brings young readers to a fascinating new place they’ll likely need to locate on a map to understand. It’s so refreshing to read a coming-of-age story of a place where most would know little of daily life. Gigi Sedlmayer, a German-born expatriate to Australia published this first YA novel of the series in 2013 about a young girl named Matica living on a remote plateau with a small indigenous community in Peru. Despite name-dropping three very different locations, there’s more to the story than just points on the globe, for sure.

Writing about a family of Australian missionaries raising a family and teaching the local population halfway across the word begins an interesting premise. Come Fly With Me focuses on the family’s daily life, encouragingly focusing on how the educator parents strive to integrate with the community from a position of service and being good neighbors, rather than dwelling on how different they are from everyone else. The story itself falls somewhere between a children’s book and a YA novel.

Where does a story like this fit for an international audience in 2022? Well, incidentally, the setting of a tiny, remote village receiving an almost freeform education based on their own needs and resources feels contemporary but also timeless. Many YA stories that cover themes of being in high school or boarding school or even Hogwarts will all one day feel antiquated should a reader revisit the stories far after they’ve been published. I remember loving all the Beverly Cleary and Matt Christopher books when I was a kid, but when I revisit them now all the details about school life for these characters feels like such a bygone era. On the other hand, reading about missionary education in a society removed from most of modern life feels like an understandable constant that’s easy to relate to while also being fantastically different from a world that I, the reader, know as my own.

I suppose it’s about time I mention this is a story of a young girl with a physical disability who befriends two giant, endangered condors, and rescues their only offspring. With little more than bravery, cunning, compassion, and a hint of preternatural ability (a nice zest of fantasy holding the story together), Matica saves the condor couple’s egg. She incubates the egg at home with her family, away from the poachers keeping the condors perpetually vulnerable. Finally on the same day as Matica’s birthday, the egg hatches and we are introduced to Talon, the condor who beat the odds.

The missionary family is quite nurturing, though Matica’s relationship with her loving father is most salient. The father, Crayn, empowers his daughter to accomplish all the things she puts her mind to, and sometimes offers her insight on her successes. Matica is routinely picked on by other students for being small, disabled, different. So, this theme of support approaches the line of heavy-handed in this story but manages to stay within the boundaries of heartwarming and appreciated.

At one point Crayn comments that his daughter had “trained” the condors, also describing them as belonging to Matica. The concept of this young girls possession of these giant animals, assigned the names of Tamo and Tima (and later, their hatched son named Talon) by the young girl, is a bit misplaced. I believe it’s better for the reader to understand Matica’s relationship with the condors as mutually intelligible and beneficial at most. After all, for the protagonist to be able to bond with these magnificent creatures through non-verbal communication portrays her strengths as they outshine her physical limitations.

I’ll admit I struggled with the names of many of the characters in Come Fly With Me, and wondered if Sedlmayer’s name choices were this intentional. Without needing to explain the character relationships, I’ll just tell you that a handful of the prominent characters in this story are named as follows: Pito, Mito, Mira, Matica, Tamo, Tima, and Talon. In fact, I did end up writing down several of these names with some notes to identify each person’s relationship to the main character, Matica. Taking notes unfortunately brought me out of the story on occasion, but by about halfway through the book it was clear that remembering these correlational details had become largely irrelevant. The main story held up just fine.

I also struggled with Matica constantly referring to Talon the condor as her best friend. The author did a nice job in personifying all the condors, though their placement in the story necessarily kept them interacting only with Matica and never without her. Later, it occurred to me that this girl’s world is very small and simple. There are very few people in her world, let alone children her own age to play with. Combine that understanding, then imagine growing up in a community where your father is everyone’s teacher and the students in his class – in your class – tease and harass you while your father teaches. This helped me understand how Matica could learn to love a condor more than anyone else.

One scene that stands out above all others for me involves the Talon’s hatching. By this time the entire village had learned about Matica’s rescue of the condor egg, and the endeavor to save the endangered species. Everyone was rooting for her and the promise of a new condor; the teasing that Matica endured from schoolmates had all but ended as well. Locals had spotted Matica walking towards Tamo and Tima’s plateau one day only to later see her rushing home for some reason. Those observers correctly guessed the reason, and they excitedly followed her home so they could also witness the hatching. More locals spotted those locals, and in no time we’re greeted with a full nativity scene at the family’s house where everyone was able to partake in the joy.

There’s no real conflict to speak of in this story, which does expose the plot to a bit of monotony. Earlier on, we learn about the threat of poachers and witness an incident that almost spelled disaster for the condors, but that issue resolves rather quickly. However, Sedlmayer does a good job replacing the central conflict with the struggles of a young girl rearing a condor chick until he’s strong enough to fly on his own.

I understood why Matica was tasked with securing the egg in the first place, though it wasn’t totally clear why Talon wasn’t returned to his parents after hatching. Perhaps he was still considered to be too vulnerable in the event of poachers advancing on the condor habitat again. Nonetheless, this second act of the story is predicated on this large bird growing up (quickly) in a human dwelling.

Despite lacking a central conflict, Come Fly With Me serves up a useful lesson for younger readers about the protracted journey and effort of raising animals. To that end, the story does a great job of noting all the minor victories and lessons from that responsibility. Book one stands up well on its own, but I imagine that the young readers for whom the story of the animal bond resonates most strongly will love the opportunity of reading the rest of the series. There were hints that the family needed to return to Australia soon to visit family members, so perhaps the saga introduces more world locations of interest, as the Silkie award-winning books are known to do.