PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThese are women few of us have heard of before, with the exception of Amelia Earhart, whose saga shines so brightly that it nearly blinds us to all other pioneering female pilots ... For women whose achievements were discounted based on their sex, the frequency of skin-deep descriptions feels jarring, and occasionally makes it difficult to keep track of the characters. These superficialities nonetheless give way to vibrant accounts of airplane racing, with the women speeding around the country, crossing oceans, making fantastic turns around hazardous pylons and flying so high into the air that they carry oxygen tanks beside them. Each struggles for opportunity—begging sponsors, borrowing planes, dealing with unscrupulous organizers, and taking risks equal to those of their male colleagues—but with fewer rewards to tempt them. O’Brien’s prose reverberates with fiery crashes, then stings with the tragedy of lives lost in the cockpit and sometimes, equally heartbreakingly, on the ground.
