Just One More Day
The latest of Jessica Blair’s historical romance novels is a juxtaposition of the tense and the tender, the pain and the joys of romance, and the highs and lows of wartime flying, set amid the years of World War II. Nineteen-year-old Carolyn Maddison chooses to follow her brother into the RAF by joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. In doing so, she both meets a lifetime friend, Lucy, and forms an attachment to a pilot who suggests she serves on a bomber station. When the pilot is killed shortly after their meeting, it shakes Carolyn, and this, coupled with her first-ever sighting of an active aircraft catching fire and killing its crew, prevents her from wanting to form romantic attachments to any man while the war rages. But her time in Waddington, serving with the bomber unit of Lancasters and Spitfires, gradually leads her, and the others around her who are serving in the RAF and WAAF, to find their own ways of handling their hopes, dreams and relationships as their comrades fall, and they hope and pray that each and every one of them will live to see another day.
This is a lovely, heart-warming book that finds joy in the relationships, be they romantic or otherwise enduring friendships. It remains uplifting, even in the face of various tragedies that occur, and the emotional difficulties the characters face. If you have read Jessica Blair’s other fiction, you will not be disappointed; if you wish to read a tale of war in which hope and the love and camaraderie of human relationship win out over the fear and the devastation, then this is the book for you.
