Book Reviews
In the solid latest from veteran novelist Doig (The Whistling Season), 11 starters of a close-knit Montana college championship football team enlist as the U.S. hits the thick of WWII and are capriciously flung around the globe in various branches of the service. Ben Reinking, initially slated for pilot training, is jerked from his plane and more or less forced to become a war correspondent for the semisecret Threshold Press War Project, a propaganda arm of the combined armed forces. His orders: to travel the world, visiting and writing profiles on each of his heroic teammates. The fetching Women's Airforce Service Pilot who flies him around, Cass Standish, is married to a soldier fighting in the South Pacific, which leads to anguish for them both (think Alan Ladd and Loretta Young). Meanwhile, Ben's former teammates are being killed one by one, often, it seems, being deliberately put into harm's way. Doig adroitly keeps Ben on track, offering an old-fashioned greatest generation story, well told.
Publishers Weekly
This inspiring World War II novel features a large cast of skillfully drawn characters and celebrates the many sacrifices made by anonymous soldiers during the war; fans of Doig (The Whistling Season) will welcome his characteristic warmth and generosity. The narrative follows the members of an undefeated high school football team from Montana after the war casts them all over the globe. At the center is Ben Reinking, who has been selected by the army to report on his teammates in various theaters of the war. These reports quickly become popular, but as the losses mount, Reinking is increasingly pressured by the government to report information selectively or in ways that are misleading. In the end, Doig has important things to say about our thirst for heroes and heroic stories and where we might find them. He also shows great sympathy for the unheralded men and women who fought this war.
Library Journal
The members of a legendary Montana college football team become grist for the World War II PR mill in this latest from Doig (The Whistling Season, 2006, etc.). Ben Reinking isn't thrilled to be yanked out of pilot training and told that his assignment for the duration is to write about his former Treasure State University teammates for the Threshold Press War Project (TPWP), which provides ready-made stories for local newspapers across America. Despite their undefeated season at TSU in 1941, Ben has bad memories of their bullying coach, indirectly responsible for the death from overexertion of the squad's 12th man, and he despises Ted Loudon, the smarmy sports columnist who dubbed them the "Supreme Team" and now thinks their collective story will be a propaganda bonanza. In the war's far-flung theaters, from the jungles of New Guinea to bomb-blasted Antwerp, Ben struggles to write honestly about his teammates, including one who's a conscientious objector, under the constraints imposed by the TPWP, which wants heroes, not the truth. His other major preoccupation is Cass Standish, a crackerjack pilot confined by her gender to ferrying fighter planes to bases. Ben and Cass are having a torrid affair, but she's married and too honest to pretend she knows what will happen when her husband comes home from the Pacific. Doig, as always, brings American history alive in a rousing narrative that doesn't airbrush the past; questions of loyalty, courage and conscience, he shows, were just as complicated during World War II as they are today. He offers several scenes with his trademark blend of high drama underpinned by technical know-how: Ben and a buddy struggling to get a tired old plane in the air from a soft gravel runway; Ben reporting into a microphone attached to an unwieldy tape recorder as he lands with the Marines at Guam. Montana remains important as home ground, for the main characters and their author, but it's a pleasure to see Doig expanding his horizons. Another fine effort from a veteran writer who knows how to play to his strengths while continuing to challenge himself.
Kirkus Reviews