This book made me realized that I need to read an excerpt of the book before I get it as a galley. I tried hard to read the book with its miserable formatting so that I could raise some of my netgalley ratio but after several dozen attempts at it, the reading experience doesn't improve through time. 
 I love to read history and have read a lot of WW2-related books and watch a lot of WW2 movies throughout the years but this book was my first legit attempt to read YA Historical Fiction and it didn't end well for me. I'm not sure whether it was intentional or it was the author's style of writing but I genuinely had a problem with the immature teenage writing voice which seem pretty forced and very passive. 
 I have nothing against epistolary novels but I have a harder time believing the character and the plot. I have a continuous issues with badly done stream of consciousness but the fillers is dredging. Nobody have time to read unnecessary things. If I want to torture someone who is a writer to write something as a torture form, I probably made them watch me burn all of their writings and make them start all over again until they get the fillers out. By the way, was it supposedly a tribute to 1001 Night's Scheherazade? 
 But most of the problem I had with the novel was I didn't expect it to be just a story of best friends bonding in WW2 setting. I expected a WW2 spy novel with intelligent plot and intelligent characters with intrigue and maybe some genuine friendship but most of the time its not. Its a historical chic lit and most of the time it busied itself with the characters conflict more than the actual story aside with some infodumps. The descriptives can be uneven as the dialogues and frankly this book always made me feel old. It dragged you along the narratives and if you're not invested with the characters, you're doomed to series of DNFs attempts. 
 I was familiar with 1941 because that was the year when the Japanese Imperial Army occupied my country after they rain fire from up north and destroy lives and killed millions and the occupation ended on 1945 that the western hemisphere simply forgotten about it and conveniently forgotten the British army being left to die here too. So, I read a lot of WW2 stuff and really, it was a given to be extremely skeptical about a teenage-appropriated for teenage audience war story. Seriously, didn't we already have real teenage girls war story about them being a victim of war, sexual abused and suffer in every worst form possible that made the girls fates seems mild and trivial. Yes, there are some violence, torture and gore but if I think that was mild in war stories, you'd guess how unrealistic this book can be. And the dual narrative doesn't help too even with all the added twists. 
 I can learn to appreciate the novel as a medium for female aviators etc but if you don't have a background in aviation and not interested in them, its a lot harder to get interested in it with non-general descriptions. What made them interesting, the emotional values and what drive them to take the risk and have that interests and added experiences etc. Give the added informations meaningful and soulful or else all of the technical stuff no matter how it was genuinely authentic. I would do that too whenever I talk about medical science stuff. Make the information worth remembering rather than unnecessary waste of writing space. 
 Sometimes I wished if the book was as dark as its cover but I guess you have to please your chosen demographics. I don't think its a good YA book on the war (I recommend War Horse, The Book Thief, Anne Frank) and personally, if I was a teenager, I'm not sure I like it as it is. As far as the usual historical fiction goes, I rather see this story expressed in movies. It does have a good visual and cinematographic premises rather than a novel. 
 The ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.