Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

Rating:
Summary: Not what I was expecting
Review: 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.