I'm finding this one hard to give stars to, because while intellectually I know that this book was well-researched and tells a compelling story, I found it hard to get into. As far as research and back matter goes, I would give this 5 stars, but my personal reading experience was more like two.

Wein's book covers the Night Witches, women pilots in World War II from the USSR, which was the only country that allowed women to fly in combat situations. This is an exciting story: it's got war, gender roles, the threat of Stalin and Hitler looming over it all. You find out a lot about many members of the three regiments that these pilots served in, and the maneuvers they performed.

So why didn't I love it? Other than Marina Raskova, I found it hard to keep track of all the women. The narrative jumps between regiments, and it's hard to remember which Galya you are reading about at the time. Based on the way the Russian language works, the last names all generally end with an -a and many first names do as well. If you're tired and reading this (as I often was) it really starts to blend together. I even took two years of Russian between high school and college and I was still having trouble following. After a while it all started to feel the same to me. I was really intrigued by the part at the end where many of the women talked about how they only flew because they wanted to defend their homeland, not to actually become pilots. The beginning of the whole book was very strong, it was just the later chapters where it started to become harder for me to follow.