Tim Connor

I will say first I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publishers for the opportunity to read this.

I found this book overall to be sort of meh; for all that the book has Margaret Witt (and a coauthor) as the author, it's weirdly told in 3rd person, and in this very odd, kind of stilted voice? That choice was interesting, but made it hard to get through the book. I'm also wary as a person of the US military, and there's a lot of the sort of military bruhaha that makes me uncomfortable; the homonationalism was just uncomfortable, and it was especially hard to read about Witt's early experiences of sexual harassment. I know, given Major Witt's story, that I should have been primed to have that, but it was still uncomfortable.

The value of this book, for me, was in the way the book explained legalese and the arguments about DADT, which definitely have some historical value. If you want a fairly comprehensive and approachable explanation of the legal arguments around it, I would definitely read this book!… (mehr)

I wish so much that this had been a fiction novel, not because it was a bad non-fiction book, but because all the beats were there for a piece of fiction, but it was Major Margaret Witt's real life (and her family's real life). It tells the story of her as well as the story of her fight to stay in the Air Force after she is revealed to be a lesbian.

It was an up and down book. And I cannot imagine even coming close to living through it. Just as when I read Serving in Silence, for a lot of the book I was amazingly angry (especially with everything that was going on in the great world while I was reading this in 2018).

The author wrote about not just the trail too, which was nice, but we also got to know so much about not just Witt, but those around her too. And that gave such depth to the journey.

The one thing that tripped me up a little was some of the law stuff. A lot of it was very specific and my eyes glazed over from some of it.

Still before I'd read this I didn't know I needed to read it, but, with how everything seems to be going backwards these days. This was just a little bit real life (not fictional) hope in my day.… (mehr)