Those Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines: A Review of "Sky Girls"

Writing history is difficult. All events and people tie to other events and people, so the historian/author needs to decide where to “cut off” in order to focus their writing into some semblance of a narrative. There’s a fine line between including so much extraneous information that it confuses the reader and makes them lose track of the book’s central topic, and not including enough details and causing the reader to feel ignorant for not being able to read between the lines.

In theory, Gene Nora Jessen’s book Sky Girls: The True Story of the First Women’s Cross-Country Air Race is the sort of nonfiction, historical book I look forward to reading. There’s something about the era about the Roaring Twenties that inherently ignites the imagination, as technology was just entering modernity, yet very little had been done with it. Everything was open to “firsts.” 

The Powder Puff Derby of 1929 was the first cross-country air race exclusively for women pilots. Yes, Amelia Earhart was among them…but her part in the story pales in comparison with some of the less famous (yet somehow more colorful) figures, including Louise Thaden, “Pancho” Barnes, and Mary Haizlip.

Going into Sky Girls I was sort of hoping for something along the lines of the movie Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines. While there were some moments like that (it seems like most of their landings were emergency ones!), it ultimately was more like a visit to a museum. Tons of information, but without prior familiarity with the subject matter (or working knowledge of the aviation jargon used) I was at a loss to put any of it into context for a cohesive “plot.” I was so lost, in fact, that I had to go back and re-read parts of it just to figure out who won the race.

The actual “story” of the race ends about a hundred pages before the book itself, followed by a lengthy epilogue following the major players’ lives after the race. Then the author gives an outline of the history of women in aeronautics, touching even upon her own experience. All of this would have been fascinating, except there simply wasn’t enough space to devote to so many different topics, leaving me feeling frustrated that she didn’t just write a couple different books focusing on different eras—or even an autobiography. All of this gave me the unsatisfying feeling like when J.R.R. Tolkien keeps dragging out the end of The Lord of the Rings—by the time the book ended, I was just happy to be done with it. (Some people like this sort of thing, but personally I like books that end with me still wanting more.)

Because of this, I have to say that this book is not one of those one-stop reads, but rather a “gateway” book that introduces so many different people, historical events, and origins of human flight, that the reader is forced to look for further reading material to satisfy their curiosity of more specific details of these topics.