Excerpt from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But this particular plane wasn't hers. It belonged to Captain Girard, who'd known her father in the Great War and who'd been something like a father to her since she was a baby herself, teaching her everything he knew about airplanes since the day she told him her dream of flight. He'd hired her on as one of his mechanics. He had an official pilot, though, a man who used the plane to ferry executives to their meetings around the country because this was faster and more impressive than travel by rail.

There wasn't a businessman around who'd trust Flora to do the actual work of flying him, although plenty had unknowingly trusted her to make sure the plane was safe, which was every bit as important. People were funny about things they couldn't see. If they couldn't see it, it wasn't there. Or at the least, it didn't affect them. But the world didn't work that way, did it? There were things all around that you couldn't see, and these things had power.

And so, even though the captain had been nothing but generous, it would take years of what she made at the airfield and at her other job, singing at the Domino, to afford a plane of her own. A Staggerwing could cost seventeen thousand dollars. She'd have to win something like the Bendix to afford the down payment. Which she couldn't do without a plane of her own.

Frustrated, as always, Flora reached up to fill the gas tank on the upper wing, inhaling the blue-smelling fumes of ninety-octane fuel. She caught a glimpse of the sky and frowned. The clouds over-head didn't look good. She hoped they'd hold off for an hour or two so she could get in a flight. But you never could trust a spring sky in Seattle.

She hopped down, her boots crunching on the gravel runway. She climbed on the other wing to fill the tank on the opposite side. Fueling the plane always took a while: one hundred ten gallons of gas was a fair amount, and the men at the airfield were about as keen to help her as they were to see her in the cockpit.

She checked the snaps on her blue canvas coveralls. Securely fastened. She had a superstition that if she wasn't buttoned up, nothing else could be. And while she was under no illusions about her own mortality — everybody and everything died someday — she aimed to keep that someday far in the distant future. Just thinking of it gave her a headache.

The plane looked good, so she turned the props over by hand to make sure no engine-damaging oil had accumulated in the pair of bottom cylinders. Satisfied, she opened the door on the port side and climbed in past the pair of seats in the back. Feeling her usual preflight giddiness, she walked forward to the front, where the polished wood on the instrument panel beckoned.

She strapped herself in and looked out the windshield. It wasn't raining yet, but it would be soon. She could feel it, the sense of change and trouble in the air. Because the plane had a tail wheel, she couldn't see the ground around her. But she'd checked and trusted it was clear. One of Captain Girard's men waved a flag and Flora accelerated. When she reached forty miles per hour, the tail wheel lifted, giving her better visibility. She pushed the engine more, and at sixty miles per hour, the plane rose. Faster still, and she was fully airborne.

Flora smiled. Every time, this separation of herself from the earth below was a miracle. She rose, and gravity tugged downward on her belly as she ascended and nosed south. If not for the clouds, she'd be able to see Mt. Rainier, a snow-capped volcano that overlooked the city like a pointy-headed god. Below her, Lake Washington extended its own limbs, a long green-gray body of water that reminded her of someone dancing. The lake's south end looked just like an arm flung skyward, where the north was a pair of bent knees. Pointed Douglas firs and brushy cedars surrounded it. And then, clustered around twisty roads, tiny houses and all the lives and chaos within.

Excerpted from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough. Copyright © 2015 by Martha Brockenbrough. Excerpted by permission of Arthur A. Levine Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.