Rebel Wing by Tracy Banghart

Synopsis (from Goodreads)

Pages: 372 

Publisher: Alloy Entertainment

Released: 29th of July 2014

The Dominion of Atalanta is at war. But for eighteen-year-old Aris, the fighting is nothing more than a distant nightmare, something she watches on news vids from the safety of her idyllic seaside town. Then her boyfriend, Calix, is drafted into the Military, and the nightmare becomes a dangerous reality. 

Left behind, Aris has nothing to fill her days. Even flying her wingjet—the thing she loves most, aside from Calix—feels meaningless without him by her side. So when she’s recruited to be a pilot for an elite search-and-rescue unit, she leaps at the chance, hoping she’ll be stationed near Calix. But there’s a catch: She must disguise herself as a man named Aristos. There are no women in the Atalantan Military, and there never will be.

Aris gives up everything to find Calix: her home. Her family. Even her identity. But as the war rages on, Aris discovers she’s fighting for much more than her relationship. With each injured person she rescues and each violent battle she survives, Aris is becoming a true soldier—and the best flyer in the Atalantan Military. She’s determined to save her Dominion . . . or die trying.

What I Have to Say 

This book was actually better than I expected after reading the first few chapters. The character development of Aris was good. At first it seemed like it would be a really sappy love story of how a girl goes to war because she just can't live without the boy her entire life revolves around (and who she has no personality without). It turned out to be a whole different story about how she comes into herself and learns to stand on her own two feet. 

The writing was fairly good, except for one thing that bugged me. The pronouns for the females in the army. It jolted me out of the story quite a bit because when you are a woman sneaking into the army, surrounded by other women sneaking into the army, I feel in your head you would try to think of them as male even if you knew the truth. Because it lessens the chances of slipping up when speaking to other people. I don't know, that's just how I feel. 

The other thing that bothered me was the fact that a society that was happy to have women in charge of the government just couldn't stand to have them in the army. That just didn't make sense for me. The fact that a society could have that level of development and still have that kind of exclusion rang false to me. 

On the whole, this book wasn't that great. But as I said, it grew better as I continued reading it.