All the Brave Promises

by Mary Lee Settle

Mary Lee Settle volunteered for service in the women's auxiliary arm of the Royal Air Force in 1942. She was a lone young American in a barracks full of British women. All the Brave Promises is her recollection and evocation of those war years.
From her ignominious treatment at the hands of rowdy barracks mates to her friendship with young RAF pilots and her tracking of Allied planes through night fog and blackout, Settle successfully re-creates the heightened sense of danger that pervaded wartime Britain, the immobilizing fear she dealt with on a daily basis, the heady enthusiasm that sometimes broke the tense atmosphere, and the unbridgeable gulf that divided officers from the enlisted ranks. With a mixture of passionate honesty and earthy humor, this masterful, award-winning writer crafts a memoir that is as much a tribute to the generation that fought World War II as a moving account of one woman's extraordinary wartime experience.

Genres: World War II, Memoir, British Literature, Nonfiction

166 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 1980

About the author

Graduate of Sweet Briar College. Winner of the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie.

Reviews

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An American volunteers for WAAF duty in the UK and spends most of her WWII time listening at a radio station to guide in wayward warplanes returning from the continent. The listening is constantly subject to enemy jamming, so a thread through the book is her picking out faint voices through the jamming signals and picking up faint signals given off by other people as her senses heighten.

She related incidents and impressions with 20 years' distance. She is posted at a camp, a vacated country house she revisits later when reoccupied, has leave in London and other places, and relates incidents and impressions. She was raised with American expectations for individualism and is not a fan of the UK's obvious class system and the casual discrimination and bitter resentments it enables.

A quick read and a unique memoir on the war.

[Anastasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brian's mom LOVES to read, and is quite the collector of books. Her houses in Portland and out at the coast are overflowing with books, so I can always find something to read at either place. I picked this book up at the beach house. It's a nonfiction book about an American woman who joined the Royal Air Force in WWII. It won the National Book Award and was called "one of the most moving accounts of war experience ever encountered" (Library Journal) as well as "one of the few really good books to come out of the second world war" (Commonweal). I figured I couldn't go wrong with this book choice.
But - truth told, I did not like this book. Maybe I have not read enough books about WWII to make a comparison. I found the writing cold and disjointed. There was no flow or fluidity to the prose nor any sense of discernable timeline (which, I suppose, I had thought would occur with a book about the war). Additionally, there was no map of the UK in this edition, so I had no idea where she was stationed in relation to London or the European continent without getting online. I suppose I should read some of Mary Lee Settle's other works to see if her writing style is the same in all her books, or if she was dry and distant in this particular volume as a sort of mental/emotional way of keeping her war experience a safe distance away from her sanity.

[Barbpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it pays to be putting stickers on old books at the library; for example, when you come across a gem like All the Brave Promises!

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Waste of time.