Timely ... Lively and entertaining ... Stirs the imagination ... All the stories of the Atta-Girls’s romances and partying enliven Spitfires and add to its enjoyability. But the book could have cut back just a smidgen on the abundant stories about these pilots’ lives.
[Aikman's] most impressive feat yet ... Aikman’s research is thorough: These pilots left their homes in the USA for England in an effort to remake themselves, and Aikman is able to hold in one hand the women they intentionally became, while also sympathetically revealing the pasts they hid from sight ... Within the history we think we know so well lie unique, feeling individuals, working under constant threat of ever-present danger both to serve their country and for a taste of exhilarating freedom like they’d never known. Spitfires truly enthralls.
Based on extensive research (letters, diaries, archives, interviews with the subjects’ friends and relatives, even an interview with the one living pilot, age 105), Aikman richly details the stories of these dauntless women.
