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Wings soars and takes fantasy-romance series novels to new heights
Photo by Kelsey Haasch
Written by Allyson Rengifo- Staff Writer
Aprilynne Pike’s #1 New York Best selling debut novel Wings is the compelling first novel in her faerie series that introduces a new and interesting way to look at faeries. Fifteen year-old Laurel Sewell just moved to a new city, and has recently started attending public school after being home schooled for the majority of her life. The thought of going to public school scares her, because she knows that she is different from everyone, but after she begins to adjust to the change, she finds herself not hating school as much as she thought she would. However, she does not know that this move will change the course of her future entirely.
She wakes up to find a small bump on her back. First she thinks it is a zit, but when it becomes the size of a golf ball, she starts to expect the worst, but never would have guessed that it would turn out to blossom into a giant wing-like flower. Laurel decides to tell David, her new best friend about this “thing” on her back. Not soon after her family visits their old home where she meets Tamani, a fellow faerie that answers some of her questions about what is happening.
As Laurel goes about learning more about who and what she really is, she begins to realize that she has feelings for both David and Tamani which creates a love triangle that adds to the complexity of the story.
I have to admit that I broke the cardinal rule of books when I judged this book by its cover. It is what compelled me to look at the book but also because I noticed how the cover is similar to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. The story is even similar in the aspects of mythical creatures and romances, but Twilight does not compare to the writing Pike does in Wings. The cover of Twilight did not seem to have any relation to the book itself, whereas in Wings it is all about the wing-like flowers growing out of Laurels back. As the story develops themes including the complexity of loving two people and the challenge of accepting that science can be wrong in the aspect of fairy tales being true just adds to the entangling, but enticing, plot line. This story is different from any other faerie book because the faeries aren’t the typical flying faeries that sprinkle sparkly dust on people, but they are more realistic. They related to humans in every aspect except that inside they were almost plant-like. Aprilynne Pike’s way of writing is amazing, she used very detailed and intriguing imagery that helped build the world she was creating like her description of Tamani, “His face looked like a classic painting-cheekbones clearly defined under smooth, tanned skin that looked like it would fit better on an L.A. beach than in a chilly, moss-covered forest.”
Spells, the second book in the series is released May 4, and delves deeper into the complexity of Laurel’s destiny as a faerie and the romance developing within her.
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