Glamour Girls: A Novel

World War II was an all-encompassing war for many of the nations involved. While English women may not have flown for the RAF, some still managed to become pilots, working for the Air Transport Auxiliary to ferry planes across the country. One of these, Mary Wilkins, inspired Marty Wingate’s protagonist Rosalie Wright.

Glamour Girls follows Rosalie’s wartime career from her first attempts to join up to V-E Day. By turns tender and fierce, the book is always well-written and captures the spirit of the times well, when women were suddenly granted more freedom than they’d experienced for generations but were still hobbled by strict societal expectations. At times, the book seems less like a story about Rosalie than a story about the ATA, as seen through Rosalie’s eyes.

That isn’t why I gave the book four stars rather than five. (In fact, it’s party why I gave it four rather than three.) What I found lacking in the book was depth in the side characters—especially the two men pursuing Rosalie. If the love triangle had either been more fully explored or made less prominent, I think I would have truly loved this novel.