His Very Own Girl is a historical romance set in England during WWII. The protagonists are an American medic (Joe) and an English pilot (Lulu). Lulu flies for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATS), ferrying planes from one airstrip to another. I could not stop picturing Lulu as Peggy Carter, but with a pilot’s license, which means of course that I adored her. Joe is a less sympathetic hero in the sense that he is quite sexist, but his position is consistent with his character and culture and he gets his shit together by the end of the novel. Plus, he’s a medic, so he gets a lot of extra points. Medics, in my opinion, are among the most amazing people on the planet when shit goes down. More on character development further on.

SO.

Our story begins in the middle of the war, with Lulu flying planes and hoping to get to fly the biggest ones. Lulu and her coworkers regularly meet servicemen at dances. Lulu’s rule is to avoid any serious relationships, since her last one ended in tragedy.

Joe just passed medic training and is about to go to the battlefield for the first time. When Lulu crash lands a plane, Joe gets his first real medic experience by treating her (she’s mostly fine). Joe is horrified by the thought of women moving out of the home into the workplace, and he’s especially horrified at the thought of women in dangerous jobs, such as piloting airplanes. It’s not that he feels that women can’t do these things. He thinks that they shouldn’t have to, and he doesn’t understand why they might want to.

Despite their many differences, Joe and Lulu meet at a dance and can’t stop thinking about each other. They meet at different dances, and later on, they meet when Joe is on leave. Some of their romance is conducted through letters. As the story progresses, Joe deals with the emotional and physical effects of war as well as the consequences of a Dark and Troubled Past, and Lulu worries about what life will be like after the war, when she’s no longer flying for the ATS.

Normally a character like Joe would be a non-starter for me. However, I thought he was interesting because as is so often the case, his flaws and strengths are essentially the same thing. As a medic, it’s Joe’s job to protect. He has to rush into battle, without a weapon, and be prepared to sacrifice his life in the course of saving others. On the battlefield, his protective nature is an asset.

However, Joe comes from a culture that oppresses women under the guise of protecting them (thus, the  “women and children first” mentality). When Joe applies his protective instincts towards women, he’s a jerk, although this would never occur to him. However, despite deep-seated biases, he doesn’t dismiss Lulu out of hand. He tries to understand her position. He wants to understand her. He does a lot of listening. The fact that he comes to an understanding that he should not stop Lulu from flying because flying makes Lulu happy is about as far as he gets, but I actually found that more touching than if he had suddenly had a massive feminist epiphany about equality between the genders. Joe is still a product of his time, but he’s not so inflexible that he’s unwilling or unable to let Lulu pursue her own happiness.

Lulu’s biggest challenge is overcoming grief to the point where she can risk committing to a new relationship. Her last serious relationship was with a survivor of Dunkirk and it ended in tragedy. She is terrified of opening her heart again and experiencing another, similar loss. Knowing that Joe is going to be shipped out soon (later in the book he participates in the D-Day invasion of France) terrifies her. Lulu is as protective of Joe as he is of her, but without a culture of ‘protecting’ men to back her up. I loved her from beginning to end, but she still has to go through a lot of character growth before she can be in a relationship that lasts longer than one night.

Because this is set during war, there are a lot of external challenges to this romance, but the biggest challenges are personal and internal. Joe has to decide whether or not to let go of his preconceived ideas about the roles of women and men – if not universally, then at least in the case of Lulu and himself. Lulu has to decide whether to keep her relationship with Joe a casual one based on sex and some dates, or whether to give it a whole-hearted try – writing to him, being honest with him, and being prepared to support him when and if he comes home, knowing that he’ll have been affected by his experiences.

I thought I would love this romance because pilot + medic + historical romance in an unusual time period = catnip. Then I got a couple of chapters in and thought I might hate this romance because Joe is such a traditional guy, meaning he feels it is his duty to provide a world in which women can stay safely at home without ever considering whether a woman might not WANT to stay at home. Then I wound up loving the romance because the characters, particularly Joe, are imperfect, and the world they live in is imperfect, and yet I believed that Lulu and Joe were sufficiently committed to the relationship to always work things out. I appreciated the realism of it.

I liked this romance for a lot of reasons, like the time and setting, Lulu’s general awesomeness, and the camaraderie between women on the airbase. Most of all, I liked that this romance never pretends that Lulu and Joe will never argue again, or that their lives together won’t have challenges. Joe isn’t a perfect hero, but he’s a realistic one and one who gets his shit together just enough to make a romance between him and Lulu work. Lulu has trust issues, but she opens up enough to make a romance between her and Joe work. This isn’t a fairy tale romance with an anachronistically perfect hero, but it’s a romance that suggests that even two imperfect people in an imperfect world can find happiness.