Customer Reviews

Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

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This book was released in the 1980's, not long after the record of women Wasp's was released in the 1970's. Actually there isn't much out there about these amazing women pilots even in 2007. There is a web-site that is slowly getting underway for women re-enactors of WWII. My question would be who would want to reenact what these women did? They were given an assortment of beat-up planes to haul targets for new male recruits to shoot at. They also transported new planes to the airfields, including the new type of plane-the jet. By the end of the war there were 38 female casualties whose bodies were shipped home at their families expense. No military honors, no mention at all. Certainly no grateful nation since the records were sealed until the women's lib movement of the '70's forced them open.
Another reviewer complained that the book was dry, then complained that there were not enough descriptions of planes. I personally can't imagine anything drier than descriptions of planes. No romance, not true - although certainly not much in the way of sex scenes which the other reviewer lamented. Most romances in the 1980's were not explicit and today many are still not. She also complained that there was not enough description of clothes. I didn't find that to be true and their uniforms were certainly described in detail.

If newly published today, this would certainly be more like a "relationship" novel since the relationships between these women were explored - not unlike the prolific novels of Debbie Macomber. When my college class discusses WWII in two more days I will be recommending this book to many of my students.

Having read nothing else of Janet Dailey's, I'm not sure whether this book is typical of her work or typical of the romance genre at the time it was written. I think this book would have worked better as a historical novel than the romance novel it was marketed as. It doesn't fit many of the conventions we've come to expect.

I loved that Ms. Dailey told the story of women service pilots who have received far too little recognition and respect for their work ferrying military planes during WWII, but as a romance novel this book fell flat. Her writing style kept us distanced from the characters, she focused on too many characters, and she never spent enough time immersing us in the setting that I could really feel like I was in the 1940s. The introduction she used to set us up with the history of flying was interesting, but dry and technical history. It did not bode well for the fictional story she was telling and did very little to draw me in. Ms. Dailey would name off planes rather than describe what they looked like. I never had more than a vague image of what the characters wore and how they dressed. And the book didn't even have spectacular sex scenes to make up for what else it lacked. The sex scenes were very vague and self-conscious.

I'm glad to see that she didn't make up a happy ending for all involved (which would have been far less believable considering the number of characters she followed and the losses we suffered during the war). I kind of like that not everyone actually got a Happy Ever After, and yet that's not what I'm looking for when I pick up a romance novel.