This book has been graded for interest at 14-16 years. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 228 pages in this book. This book was published 2010 by Hodder Education .

Curdella Forbes grew up in a small village in rural Jamaica, where there was a strong oral storytelling tradition. She says, "From very early on I had stories coming out of my ears, long before I was old enough to discover them in books. " Now a teacher of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, Curdella lives in Kingston with her niece and an itinerant cat named The Wild One. She says of Flying With Icarus, "It is a book about how the everyday world is full of magical things, but you have to have special eyes to see them. Children usually do. "