Airman's Wife

[from inner dj flap] When a girl puts on the uniform of her country it does not mean that she forswears romance, as Sue Bradford was to discover when she became a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service -- in other words, a WREN.

She was stationed at a great base of the Fleet Air Arm that was near enough to London for the WRENS and the young naval officers to go there on pass to dine and dance.

In the vast upheaval of war, human destinies are buffeted about and assume strange shapes. Life for Sue proved very complicated as she became inextricably enmeshed in as perplexing and trying a problem as ever a loyal and loving young heart had to face.

Renée Shann has made the chronicles of the new women soldiers her own special territory and has written several widely popular stories of the kind, among them TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LEAVE, WAR WIFE, and AIR FORCE GIRL. The dramatic love story that is told in AIRMAN'S WIFE should make it one of her most successful books.

It's a pity Renée Shann's stories don't match her dust jackets. Because the latter are so much vintage fun and the former, just such mediocrity. Part of it is that she favors one of my most-hated tropes: otherwise capable male mcs who are, unaccountably, besotted with & bamboozled by beautiful, openly bitchy connivers. Seriously, zero emotional intelligence and it drive me nuts. I really wish I could understand why that narrative was so popular -- well into the mid-century, too! In this case, the wealthy, accomplished, lightly-disabled pilot Paul Lister mopes around on his gentleman's farm while his wife flagrantly cuckolds him up in London: "'Someone called Gerry was confirming that he'd meet you for lunch at one. I hope you had fun with him.' He turned to Sue with a rueful grin: 'That's the kind of good-natured husband I am. I always pass on messages from my wife's boyfriends.'" (33) Really, just no pride at all. And somehow the female mcs still love and respect them? Explain this to me.

Shann's writing's no great shakes, either. "His eyes were a brilliant blue and he had good teeth and a mouth that seemed as if it had done a lot of smiling", etc. And most of the book is just Sue endlessly agonizing over the stupid, off-limits man she loves and the fact that "her dreams would get her nowhere." (57) Another handsome -- "looking just like Robert Taylor" (159) -- unselfish and available young airman is equally pathetic and pride-less about Sue and the whole thing is just interminable small-scale melodrama.

Of interest might be the girls' discussions comparing different branches' women's service uniforms, and Sue's mom's bout with pneumonia --"she'll never be as strong as she was" (174) -- which is the one episode that feels emotionally authentic and is a sobering reminder of how dangerous relatively common illnesses still were on the eve of the antibiotic era.

Otherwise, unless you fancy two hundred pages of pining, I'd give this one a pass.