The writing is so very bad that I would describe this as an amateur biography. It’s a real shame because I enjoy the subject matter and feel that I’m very patient but at the halfway point in this book, I realized that the author wasn’t going to stop with his obsessive-compulsive writing and decided to give up on it.
Is Wade McClusky a qualified dive-bomber pilot, experienced and skilled with the STB Devastator? His squadron sunk two Japanese carriers in a single mission, so what is the point in belaboring this point? Let this poor dead horse alone already. But this author won’t do it. Over and over and over and over and over without mercy he beats this horse and I, personally, have better books to read. Dusty Kleiss commented publicly that McClusky wasn’t the best choice as squadron commander because he flew at 190 knotts toward the Japanese fleet instead of 160 (“like a proper STB pilot”), which threatened the fuel consumption in the rearward planes in his attack group. That’s pretty much the sum total of the criticism. So let it alone? No, Rigby won’t leave it alone, and after about the 20th time bringing it up, I called it quits.
The second problem, and I might have been able to stick through the bad writing, but the tipping point was the narrator: he uses a robotic text-to-speech voice that grates after a while, over-pronunciating every word and is even more OCD than the author. A bad combination. A better narrator who doesn’t sound like Robbie The Robot would have made it possible to endure the bad writing in order to get through to the details. There are some good details in this book but they are hard to get to.
My review stars are based on the fact that I could not finish the book. If I give up on a book then it’s 2 stars at best.