Determined to help the effort, female Russian air pilot Valka signs up to join an all-female aviation group, but as the war intensifies she has to decide how much she is willing to risk to defend the skies she calls home.

"Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. All she knew was that her grandmother and her mother had fled their home city of Königsberg in the far east of Germany near the end of World War II, never to return. But everything changed when O'Donnell traveled to Königsberg -- now known as Kaliningrad, and part of Russia -- and called her grandmother, who uncharacteristically...

A soldier-boy earns a ten-day leave to go home to his mother by performing a desperate act of bravery at the front. On the way home he has many small adventures.