Review: Excellent reading
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 9, 2014
This is a believable story about a young man who loves to fly and takes the necessary steps to make sure he is in a position to learn to fly in pre-WWII England. You learn to respect his willingness to sacrifice and do what is necessary to that end. This pre-war flying obviously serves him well through the rest of the story, which is about the RAF in early WWII. The preparation for combat, combat, and the waits between missions were all very believable and easy to get into. At some points you feel like your living the battle.For an American the British slang sometimes took some serious thought to understand but taken in context most of it was easy to work out. That was part of the unique aspect of this book for me and I enjoyed working out those more obscure slang expressions. Remember, in Great Britain they speak English, in America we speak American. There are many differences but they are almost all interesting. Did I get it right that they called England "Blighty"?If I was able I would have given this book 4.5 stars but that is not an option and it was too good to knock down to four. Still, there are some parts that I didn't particularly care for but didn't rise to a level that I was comfortable knocking it down a full star.1) As someone mentioned earlier, the gratuitous sex scene early in the book. I understand how it set the foundation for the relationship later in the story but it could have been less graphic and the foundation set in a few paragraphs.2) Although the writing detail was consistent with the rest of the book, the entire chapter 09 could have been, well, "less". Chapter 09 just got boring to me and I skimmed over most of it and I'm sure I didn't miss anything important to the story. I could understand all that detail if the Epilog had included a description of a post war meeting. What meeting? Meeting with who? Read the book, it is well worth it.3) I would have liked to see a bit more meat in the ending. It seemed it was going along and all of a sudden it was over. Bang! End of story.With all of this said, I will not hesitate to read more stories by Ken Fowler. I think he is an excellent writer.