Goosebumps #52: How I Learned To Fly Review

How I Learned To Fly is the black sheep in the Goosebumps family because it just doesn't seem to belong in a series of horror books. Confused? So am I. Let's explain, shall we? Oh, I should remind you all. Like the other Goosebumps reviews, this is a comprehensive story review, meaning HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

Those birds are the scariest things about this book, and they're not even in the book!

Right away we're introduced to our main characters. You've got Jack, the protagonist, who was given a nice heterosexual name like Jack. (50 points to you if you actually get that reference).  Jack is always in competition with another boy named Wilson, who is constantly one-upping him in everything they do. Wilson wins at everything, well except for names, and I'm guessing that Wilson tries to tell everybody that his name was inspired by Woodrow Wilson to make up for the fact that it's a crap name, but little does he know, Woodrow Wilson was a terrible president and it's much more likely that his parents happened to see Cast Away on TNT a week before he was born. 

Ladies and gents, the man who beats you at everything.

They compete over everything, but mostly do contests to see who can impress Mia, the prettiest girl in school, more. Mia proves that RL Stine knows nothing about statistics because attractiveness is not a measurable thing and is purely based on opinion, so it's probably just coincidence that both Jack and Wilson have the hots for Mia. 

Competitions happen: Jack gets a new 10 speed bike and loses in a race against Wilson and his equally new (yet somehow shinier) mountain bike. Also, these kids must live in the most boring town in the world since apparently a cat being stuck up a tree is cause for the entire population to crowd around the scene as Wilson climbs the tree and gets the cat down. So this all seems pretty silly so far, right? Where are the scary parts? You might be expecting Jack to go to a scientist who turns him into a monster so he can exact revenge on Wilson and then he can't turn back into a human, or something like that....but you're probably smarter than RL Stine, too. Just wait. 

Mia has a birthday party and Jack gets her a CD from the band The Purple Roses, because RL Stine once saw an emo kid in a preteen romance movie holding a purple rose and he liked how it looked. However, this gift is thrown out the window when Wilson gives Mia two tickets to a Purple Roses concert. This makes Jack pout for a while in the corner like a little baby man. OOH! But after that, THE BEST PART OF ANY BOOK EVER happens. You're not gonna believe this, but I can assure you that it happened and that RL Stine had to have been blasted out of his mind when he wrote this part. Wilson brings out a Twister mat and tells everyone that he's trained his dog Terminator (yes, that's actually the dog's name) to spin the color wheel. Then the dog conveniently waltzes into the room holding the color wheel and spins it with it's paw like a little doggie DJ! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the closest thing that we'll ever get to a Parappa The Rapper novel! 

No, I will not play Blurred Lines. Stop asking.

Jack loses at Twister to Wilson and then rage quits the party, despite Mia urging him to stay. Jack runs off towards the beach crying and there he comes across the plot convenience shack. He goes into the shack and it decided that he's too fat to be on this plane and he falls through the floorboards and into the basement. There, he finds a book that's of course entitled Flying Lessons. Then some rats come swarming out of the wall and instead of trying to walk around them, like any sane person would, Jack just simply stomps all over them like Donald Trump does to kittens for sexual pleasure until he finds the stairs leading out of the basement. 

Back at home, the book tells Jack about how to make a food substance that will let him fly at will. Guys, just guess what the main ingredient of the flying potion is. No, just guess. If you guessed yeast, then congratulations, you just won the Punmaster award because as the book conveniently explains, yeast rises! .....ha. So Jack mixes the yeast with some strange blue powder that came with the book, which totally isn't just blue food-colored crack, and that's when some more dog shenanigans happen. Jack's dog eats some of the food and then starts to float up and out of his house. Jack quickly eats some of the food as well and catches his dog. Now that Jack has a proper way to show Wilson that he's one of the cool kids, Jack decides that he'll fly over to the park where Mia is to show her, but not before a few pages of Jack fluttering through the breeze and enjoying his new mutated hollow bones that aren't mentioned in the book but they totally should be because having hollow bones like a bird would be pretty freaking sweet. 

When Jack shows up at the park to show Mia his flying styles, Wilson FLYS into the park and casually joins the conversation like nothing happened. 

So Wilson can fly too? Well, you might as well just kill yourself now, Jack. It's over, you can't top that. Wilson explains that he was spying on Jack when he made the flying food and then ate some himself. After a few dropped jaws by Jack and me pausing from reading to contemplate why Wilson would ever need to spy on a kid who he already beats in everything, Wilson excuses himself because he has tennis practice, which means that Jack beats Wilson in the "manly enough to realize that tennis is a gay sport" contest. Mia tells Jack that she wants to fly too and Jack goes back home to get the book, which has now disappeared. 

Jack reasons that his parents threw it out during spring cleaning, but it's more likely that the book just didn't like being cooped up in the garage so it flew away. When he returns to the park and tells Mia he can't find the book, she says that she didn't really want to fly anyway, which is a lie because everyone wants to be Batman. Okay, you've made it this far, but here's where the book gets even weirder. 

A few days later, Wilson announces to everyone at school that he has a race planned for him and Jack, which apparently is good enough to get the entire student body out of class when it happens because they all show up outside of the gym to see the race. Wilson and Jack fly-race each other and RL Stine wins because this book actually made him money. Wilson wins again. 

After the race, Wilson gets his own TV show about him flying while Jack gets stuck with the booby prize. What's behind curtain number 2, Johnny? It's two weeks of torturous experimentation at the hands of government scientists! What a fantastic prize! When Jack is released, he is told of a sponsored flying race between him and Wilson in which the winner will receive one million dollars by an anonymous donor. When the race begins, Wilson zooms off into the sky and Jack falls off the starting platform because he suddenly can't fly anymore. 

I'm using too many memes in this review...

Jack returns to his previous, boring normal life and Wilson becomes an international celebrity. Boy, that was an anticlimactic ending, wasn't it? But wait there's more! In the final chapter, Jack informs the reader that he only faked not being able to fly and he can still do it. He says that he still likes to occasionally sneak out at night and fly around in the Malibu breeze and apparently this book takes place in Malibu and I had no idea until the final chapter told me so. Jack is happy now because he gets to spend more and more quality time with Mia and for once, he's actually happy that he lost to Wilson. Daaaaawwwwwww. What a pwecious wittle ending. As you can see, this book is much more fantasy/drama than it is horror. In fact, I don't think that there was any speck of horror elements in this book, and I'm okay with that because for what it is, How I Learned To Fly is one of the best entries in the Goosebumps series. I give it nine out of ten lines of "mysterious blue flying powder".