Par Lance

Yet another WWII story of love and conflict

This book is one more reason for me to declare my love for historical fiction. The facts behind the female flyers that moved the aircraft to operational airfields were fascinating. However, without the story that Helena P Schrader, I would have struggled to wade my way through the dry descriptions.

The story brings the well researched facts to life. I have to say that the ending, well, the ending before the end of the book, is rather predictable. What would often be entitled “Epilogue,” wraps up all of the loose ends very nicely and made me feel good.

There were a few surprises littered throughout the text. Without spoiling them, I shall reveal one of them. Remember that this story is based in the days when radar was still being developed in secret, so the pilots were flying blind if they flew into cloud, or if the airfields were fog-bound. The surprise, for me, was that the pilots were instructed to bale out and ditch their plane if they were unable to land safely on an airfield. Of course, some of them bravely disobeyed these orders and managed to land against all the odds.

You can read enough about the story in the description of the book and on the cover for me not to need to tell you more. Suffice to say that it is a love story weaved around some serious flying and combat action. There are some annoying characters in the book, but you wouldn’t want to read a book where all of the characters are nice, would you?