Review: Wings

by Aprilynne Pike
publisher: HarperCollins
date published: April 5, 2011 (first published May 1, 2009)
format: NOOK ebook
pages: 240
source: free download from B&N
Amazon / Goodreads / B&N
challenges: Goodreads 2011 Reading Challenge; 2011 YA Reading Challenge; 2011 E-Book Reading Challenge

From Goodreads:

Laurel was mesmerized, staring at the pale things with wide eyes. They were terrifyingly beautiful—too beautiful for words.

Laurel turned to the mirror again, her eyes on the hovering petals that floated beside her head. They looked almost like wings.

In this extraordinary tale of magic and intrigue, romance and danger, everything you thought you knew about faeries will be changed forever.

What I Thought

I'll be honest: it took me a few chapters to warm up to this book. The first several pages were mostly about Laurel's first week in public school and her eating habits. The latter does eventually come into play as one of the differences between fairies and humans, but it is pretty dull, at first. I also just couldn't get too worked up about where Laurel chose to take her lunch breaks. However, once Laurel starts to undergo changes, things picked up considerably. As her blossom begins to grow, it wasn't quite so hard to get into the story. I spent a lot of time pondering how she was going to hide it and whether or not she would be discovered.

The characters were okay for me. I just could not connect with Laurel, though. It was akin to listening to someone else talk about a person you've never seen before. I just could not picture her, nor could I truly get into her head, so to speak. David and Tamani were a bit easier to like, though. However, not too much time is given to the latter in overall story. I know little more about him than I did before starting to read this book. The villain did exude a certain creepiness, though, and I kept wondering what his story was and what his motivations were.

I did like the way in which fairies were described in this book. It is a unique view on them and I found the biological component in which David figures out how Laurel "works" to be interesting. Something I didn't like was how long it took for the real problem to arise. For a while, I wasn't even sure that there would be any problems greater than Laurel hiding her blossom from her family and schoolmates. By the time the menace did come up, I was already resigned to the book being mostly about Laurel trying to keep a secret.

While I may not have been turning cartwheels over this book, it was a pretty interesting read and left enough of an impression upon me to make me want to read the second book in the series, Spells. The series has great potential and I hope that Spells will answer to my hopes for more action. I give Wings 3 hoots.